How To Tune A Snowboard

Hi, my name is Mark. I work at Snow Rock in Hemel, Hempstead. I am the equipment supervisor here.

I have been snowboarding for about 8 or 9 years and today, we will be going through edging your snowboard and your skis. The basic equipment we are going to need for this, for the basic edge is an edging tool with multiple degrees of angle and a gummy stone. Okay, these are the highest important ones.

If any one who wants to go a little bit further into the edging, you can buy specialist side cup guides, okay, with a file and also a thermo file and this is called a base pebble. These areas here are mainly for races and expert snowboarders and skiers. We are basically going to go through the basics with the turgo.

The first thing we do is to take our gummy stone, okay, and I am going to rub it along the edge of the snowboard itself. This is basically to remove any night frost, any rust and any other caught cues which have gained themselves on to the edge itself, okay. If you do have a major burr, this is an area where you put your finger across here and you can see a very light sharp ripple across the top part of the actual edge.

This is something we need to remove now. To remove this edge, we take a file and very lightly glide across. This can also be done within workshop and a trained technician who could remove all these very easily for you.

Next part is to pick your angle. Now, with my snowboards and skies, it is around 90 to 89 degree angle. Okay, anyone who is in racing that depends on your ski board itself and your style.

They do go to up to 87 degrees, okay. What we are going to do is put the file in the machine, do up nice and tight, okay to show the actual, this does not move, okay. If you can just see there is an arrow pointing here.

Okay, this is the direction in which you are actually going to be filing from. So we place the rollers on the base of the snowboard which means we are going to put it towards myself to start at one end, and very smoothly pull towards yourself. Do not change the pressure, okay, and change the angle, try and keep yourself in a nice smooth position.

If you do this, what will happen is that it will change the actual degrees of the sharp end, okay, and it is also going to cause a few problems when you are trying to finish off the last part. So again, do it once or twice just to gouge. Once this is done, I use very famous method which is to put your fingernails, so ladies you might want to do this, Okay, it involves basically putting your finger nail across the edge of snowboard.

What this is going to do is if you start to loose some of your finger nail tip to it, it means it is slightly sharp, you can just see it there, this is sharp, okay. You can make them sharper but that is down to your personal preference. Once you have done that, we take a large file, and we basically make sure to remove any burrs across the bottom part again.

Check and see if it is nice and sharp, Okay. This is the area we want to be sharpening and otherwise one area of the snow board which is called the contact point and this surprises the skiers as well, which are these areas here, it is the point where the snowboard touches the most amounts of snow. Now, we don't want skiers off snowboard, we have done these areas here, sharp because what happens is that it will catch and it will directly scale snowboarders often in random direction and most probably rack him down the slope.

So how we finish out that we sharpen here, we take a nice file and very lightly choose gouge for our snowboard like that, now this is still sharp and it is still going to be up to, we call as to initiate the turn but it is actually going to help stopping from rack downing right on the slope. That is the basics of actually tuning your snowboard edges. The best way you can get your best edge and the best finish with this is to bring into a technician from any qualified store because they will have to get i