SERVICING YOUR SKIS

Well serviced skis are a thing of beauty to use. They slide, turn and grip much better and significantly enhance your time on snow. Unfortunately most skiers don’t get to experience this sensation very often. Hire skis tend not to be maintained as well as they should. Ski owners generally don’t wax their skis enough or know how to tell if they need some love. Do you know how to tell if your skis need waxing, the edges tuned or if a base grind is required?

Serviced skis not only make skiing easier, but can help to improve your skiing.

A bold claim, but in our experience the difference a basic service can make to your kit is that significant. We’re not talking about taking your gear to a shop to get serviced, although this works well. We’re talking about doing it at home.

Home Servicing

The good news is that most ski servicing can easily be done at home, ensuring you make the most of your time skiing. Once you learn some basic skills you’ll have more confidence in your kit, and have a better feel for how you like your skis prepped, and just a much better skiing experience.

Start with the basics

You can get far more geeky on this stuff, which we love, but you don’t need to. You also don’t need to spend a fortune.

Start off with the basics; learn to wax and if you want to go a step further then move onto looking after your edges.

One of our original waxing irons was a flat based household iron and cost around £10. It’s still going strong 20 years later. Yes, it’s not as accurate in keeping temperature as a dedicated ski wax iron, but it did the job and still works well. It wasn’t the iron that was important, it was the knowledge of what to do with it that was valuable. That’s what we’re helping you with here.

Your local shop can help

Many ski shops offer a level of ski servicing tutorial, and it can be really useful having in-person guidance like that. Talk to your local ski shop and see if they offer this sort of ‘getting to grips with servicing’ event. Many times they’re free, as the shop makes the money from the service kit they sell (and it’s a great level of customer service).

Online tutorials

There’s also a host of tutorials online too, so it’s pretty easy to learn. You do need to be a little careful though, and make sure the people you’re learning from do actually know what they’re doing. That’s why we decided to help you, by hooking you up with great info from a team that really knows their stuff.

Connecting you with the experts

To be clear, this is not paid for and we make no money from this and have not been given anything from DataWax. This is just us trying to do our bit to help you – we love that you come to SkiKitInfo for info, and that’s what this is, really useful info.

We’ve been a fan of DataWax for some years

DataWax is a family run UK business that makes ski waxes and ski servicing kit. We’ve been a fan of their gear for some years, since just after they started. The guys that own and run it are amazing skiers (Mike and Dougie Crawford, incredible instructor and ex world-cup level amazing) and are super nice. More importantly, they really know what their talking about.

This is not advertising, marketing or a paid-for promo

They haven’t paid us for this, we don’t get any commission and they don’t know we’ve written this (at the time of writting).

We’re sure we’ll chat to them soon anyway, as we bump into them now and then.

However, this is about us providing you, the SkiKitInfo family, with info that we hope you’ll find useful. Mainly we want you to have the best time you can when skiing.

DataWax has loads of info about servicing on their site, so check out their How To articles. Have a look around their site as there’s so much cracking info for you. You can also get all the tools, waxes and ready-made kits you want from them.

The team at DataWax has also put together some super useful videos, so here’s a selection to get you started. We’ve included what we think you should learn first. Often people start by learning to sharpen edges, but we think that if you only learn one thing then it should be how to wax your ride. If you want to delve deeper into the world of servicing then check out all of their videos.

Gimme More

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Want to see more of what DataWax has to offer, you can visit their site at DataWax.com.

Independent, honest, unbiased reviews & tests

All of the info, reviews and testing by SkiKitInfo.com is independent and unbiased, to give you a full and honest appraisal of the products. Brands don’t pay us to review their kit or have any say in how the review turns out. We’re all passionate ski experts and want you to have the best information available.