Emergency Ski Surgery

Well, I suppose it was hardly an emergency, but I thought I'd document the project I did for Silas when he blew his ski edges out on an early season powder day. Too many rocks, not enough snow.

This was a classic "Marcus" project, in that I got excited about doing it, quickly took it on, then promptly ignored it for three months. Silas was good enough to travel to Europe for six weeks, with a different set of skis, so I didn't feel too badly about my delay.

Silas' skis were in pretty rough shape, so I had carte blanche to do whatever I could for them, with little fear of making them worse. My plan was to remove the damaged edge, cut back the base and clean up the core, then screw a new section of edge in, patch the base and give both skis a grind and tune (along with a few other smaller base repairs along the way).

[singlepic=903,320,240,,left] It's difficult to see the edge damage here, but there was a four inch section that had broken out. The scribed lines on the base are my rough estimates of the patch required -- I ended up going with a squared off patch, as it was easier to match the shape.

After cutting back to good edge material with the Dremel (cutting at a 45 degree angle on either end, to produce a mechanical pull-out bond with the new edge), I tried to clean up the core as much as possible and get a nice clean area to screw in the new edge. I took my time filing the edge down, cutting it a whisker long to begin with and slowly grinding it to length, to match both the 45 degree edges and the empty space as closely as possible.
[singlepic=905,320,240,,left] Once that was done, securing the edge was pretty straightforward. The microscopic screws that I got from Tognar seem designed primarily as a placeholder to keep the edge from moving until the epoxy is in place. Very easy to strip out, but I knew that ahead of time, at least. I discovered pretty quickly that the replacement edge wasn't going to be a perfect match -- Silas' skis are an older model and used a different type of edge, with a different profile. The new edge is about one mm lower than the old -- that may not sound like much, but it's a big difference on a ski. Too much to tune out with a file, too -- oh well, good thing Silas isn't a racer.

[singlepic=910,320,240,,right]Obviously, a good scotch is critical when doing ski repair.

After the epoxy holding the edge in place had cured, I set about the base patch. It turned out to be the most difficult part -- I did it three times, the base peeling back up as I tuned the ski for the first two. I think I was impatient, as everything held together the third time, after I'd waited a full three days for a proper cure before taking off the clamps.

After that was done, it was just a matter of a full base grind and edge tune, followed by a nice coat of wax. The finished product isn't perfect, but it's not bad for a first try and hopefully they'll serve Silas pretty well for a while yet.