Base Saver protects base when ironing pure fluoro topcoats

Tue, Feb  4, 2014 - By Fast Wax

Transcript from the video...

Hello, we’re live from the Fast Wax Man Cave again here and what we’re going to talk about today and show you today is a new product that we develop called our Base Saver and you use that when you iron in the fluoroated top coats.  One of the big mysteries in skiing has always been how to iron in the top coats without damaging your base?  If you take them to the stone grinder after someone’s ironed in a lot of top coats so you could look at it and the bases are glazed over and they can tell you who’s been ironing them in and who hasn’t been.

If you Roto Cork them, you tend to burn the edges and then you always risk that burning.  So it’s always been a big mystery and it’s real apprehensive for people to put on the coats and iron them in especially if you have the same old pair of skis.  So what we worked on was a, what we call our base saver.  It’s a pad that you put underneath the iron and you press down on it and that acts as an insulator between the iron and the ski, and it doesn’t burn your base.  Plus it does a much more efficient job of ironing in the top coat.

So what I’ll show you today is how to do this real simple and it’s a real nice easy way of doing it, more effective and it works better. [Time Stamp: 1:16] So what we’ll do is take our block of fluor powder and we’ll go down the ski and get a nice coating on top of the ski, all the way from tip to tail and get a nice cover on it.  Now, I tend to use and go with a couple of lighter layers, I think they’re always easier to handle.  Then we’ll take our thermal block and we’ll go down the ski and we’ll just lightly cork this in, and what we’re doing here is we’re just spreading it out and getting a nice even grey coat on the ski so the whole ski is uniformly covered with the fluro powder.

So we’ve got a nice easy coat.  We’ve worked in just a little bit.  If you want to here, what I generally do then is give it a light second coat.  I always find it easier to go over it a couple of times with light coats rather than that one heavy one.  You get a better and more uniformed coverage, and it’s more effective.  So we’ll go down and cover that again and then we’ll take our thermal block, and we’ll buff it in again.  Nice and easy, just try and get that ski base… So when you look at the base it should be just a light grey color cut down the base all the way. [Time Stamp: 2:42] 

Then what we do is once we’ve got that, we take our base saver and we place it with the tape side down.  The Teflon tape side down on the ski and we put that on the ski.  Then we take our iron and we have the iron set at about 260 degrees Fahrenheit, around 130 C.  And, we place that on the ski and then I lift and hold the back of this up with a finger.  Then the key to it is I place both hands on the iron and push down very hard just like I’m structuring a ski.  And we’ll pull this iron down the ski one time, and you can see as we go down that we’re pressing all that fluro powder into the ski and the base looks nice and clean.

The amazing difference here is if you iron in with just the iron on top of the ski, the bases look pretty ugly.  They’re glazed over and the wax is burnt on the ski.  With this system the wax is not burnt on the ski, it’s pressed into it.  And, what this pad does is it softens with heat and pushes that wax into the ski all the way from one end to the other.  Then we go right down to the tail of the ski.  We give that one pass going through the ski and you can see when you look at our base saver that there’s nothing on it.  We’ve pressed that wax right into the ski.

The base saver people ask me, how many times can you use it?  I [told them??] [4:33] this last year at burke with a single base saver through about 50 pairs of skis.  Then what I do is I take my thermal block and I clean out any of that wax that’s in the stability groove and I push that out onto the ski, and I lightly cork it in; and, this is while the ski is still warm.  Then we’ll let the ski set and cool for about a half an hour.

We’ve let our ski cool for about a half an hour so that’s it cold to the touch and one of the things that I’d like to show you now is we waxed the Atomic ski using the base saver.  So you can see that that wax is pressed right into the ski all the way across.  What we’ve done here with the Fisher ski is that we’ve waxed it in the traditional way which is putting the iron on top of the ski. If you look at it you can see the difference how the wax was pressed into the Atomic ski and how much is glazed on top of the Fisher ski.

Time Stamp: [5:53]  Then I’ll show you when I brush these off the real difference of how effective this is when we brush the Atomic ski out.  You can see that we’ll get very little wax out of that versus when I brush out that Fisher ski, it all comes back up.  So what I’ll do now is take my horsehair brush and I’ll go down the ski and I’ll brush it out.  As you can see there’s very little in-wax coming out of the ski.  A couple passes down the ski and it’s ready to go.  So you can see that it worked very easily.  I’ll give it one more quick pass just to make sure it was set.

Now this ski is ready to race and it’s going to be an extremely fast ski.  What I’ll show you now is the difference with the Fisher ski where we waxed that fluro powder in and ironed it in without using the base saver.  When I take this horsehair brush and go after, look at all the wax that comes out of that ski.  So that’s all your fluro powder that you just put in, you’re now scraping out of it.  Not very effective use of it and not very efficient!

Time Stamp:  [7:08]  I’ve demoed this base saver to several elite skiers, top waxers around the area.  Their eyes bug way open when they see it and they can’t believe it.  We demoed it at the Burke and sold out!  People look at it they see that it’s a much easier and much better.  Again if you iron it in, you’ll glaze your bases and ruin them.  If you’ve got a lot of skis, that’s no big deal.  But like most of us, we have a limited number of skis especially good racing skis.  If you use a Roto Cork to do it, you tend to tip it and burn the edges off your skis, and ruin the performance.  Plus a Roto Cork will washboard your ski and put little washboards in it, and then it really doesn’t work very well.

So you can see this is just another innovative product from Fast Wax.  It’s very efficient!  Works very well!  Real popular! Thank you!