How To Wax A Snowboard

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Hi, my name is Mark, I work at Snow and Rock in Hemel Hempstead. I'm the equipment supervisor, and I've been snowboarding for 8-9 years, roughly, and skiing as well at the same sort of time. Today what we're going to go through is basically waxing and removing the wax from a ski and a snowboard, so it makes it nice and smooth for when you're actually snowboarding and skiing.

What equipment you're going to be needing for this is a set of rubber gloves, some wax remover, a scrapper, your wax - many different types, a horse hair brush, and a scourer, and your iron to actually get the wax on. To actually do this, the first thing we're going to need is put your gloves on, because we're going to be using the wax remover, which is an irritant substance and flammable at the same time. So make sure you protect yourself during this.

We have a board on there. Get nice cloth, my wax remover is in a bottle, and what we do is spray very lightly across the board, and wipe in a circular motion to remove any excess wax. You'll realize when the wax is actually removed from the board because it will become very slidey and not as sticky, you also see, as you can see there, a lot of dirt on this board from the wax, which has been used on the snow upstairs in our snow centre.

Once that's all done, we take our nice clean board, it's all removed of the wax, as you can see, the white marks along here, okay, this is where you can see the board is in need of wax or the wax has been removed by a cleaner. Once that's all done, we take our wax, which we have here, and iron. Now the best thing you can do is always buy a proper iron, because these things actually reach a certain temperature.

Each wax has a different temperature it needs to be actually heated at. You can see there, the temperature gauge itself. Once we've done this, take your iron and your wax, and you melt it very lightly onto your board or skis, all the way to the edge.

I'm only going to get a little bit of this one, because it takes about 30 minutes for the actual wax to set before we scrape it off. Once we've done that, and the wax is off, you iron it in, in a circular motion, ensuring that the wax reaches all the way to the edges of the metal here, to make sure it's all absorbed all the way across, same order across the other side as well, and then we leave it to dry before scraping it. Here's a ski that's already been waxed today.

As you can see, the wax is nice. Try across the top area here, and that's been set for about 30 minutes to ensure the wax has all been absorbed. We then take our scraper, make sure we take the sharp edge first, place it on the ski, put thumbs and fingers like this, and push away from you to remove the wax in a nice scraping motion like this.

You can see the wax coming off, nice and evenly. Once you've done the whole ski, make sure you do the next part, which is important, which is make sure you remove all wax from the side walls of the ski and the edges. The same goes for the top part as well.

This is to make sure that you have grip while you're skiing or snowboarding, because the metal edges is what gives you grip. The next part is very important. This ski here has been completely de-waxed with the scrapper, but you can still see a few marks of where the wax has been left on.

Now what we use is our lovely little scourer, a household appliance, it's amazing what it can be used for. We just push, and we rub. This is called in-friction, and it's taking in the last little bit of wax into the ski and making sure it's all lovely and absorbed.

Now if you look at the variation between the two, you can see here what's nice and smooth, and the top part what's slightly still rough, and you can feel it. If you put your fingers over there, this is quite sticky, compared to the bottom part which is nice and smooth. The last little part is my favorite, it's the horse hair brush.

This thing gives you a little bit of extra speed. For races, this is a guaranteed must. What we do is we take the horse hair brush, we push it in, quite hard, into the actual ski itself, and push away at a 45 degree angle, all the way out on the ski.

And what this is doing, this is leaving little marks in the top sheet of the wax itself. You can just about see it. What we do again is the same angle again, except only the other way, 45 degrees again.

What this is giving it, is what we cast is a very mild structure in the actual wax itself. It aids for actual speed, so for a racers this is a must do. For anyone who likes a little bit of speed on their snowboard, definitely go for it, it's well worth it. So this is waxing your ski and your snowboard!.