The big skin reglue
Last season I got lazy after hot waxing my splitboard, and didn't scrape all the extra wax off. While on a regular snowboard that's not a big deal, the extra wax layer will eventually disappear after a few rides, it's kind of a problem with splitboards. Before you start riding, you typically use climbing skins on your uphill travel, meaning you put your sticky climbing skins on all that thick layer of wax. What happens next is, when remove the skins you pull off chunks of wax sticking to your climbing skins.
Not a great condition for climbing skins, to say the very least.
The wax I had on my climbing skins never came off entirely, and I have a section in the middle of my skins that's just slipping around. Especially while traversing hills that's a problem, because it makes finding a good side or edge foodhold really hard.
So I decided to try the reglue route. Cheaper that getting new skins, $20 for glue, compared to $200 for new skins.
The reglue process wasn't too bad:
- Protect the climbing side of the skins with painters or masking tape
- Put paper (newspaper or paper bags) on the sticky side of your skins
- Slide a hot iron over the paper, to soften the glue and have the paper layer soak it up
- Remove the paper layer
- Clean skins with a scraper; remove tree needles, dirt, wax (in my case), or whatever is on there
- Drizzle a good layer of new glue, I used Contour glue, on the skin and spread around evenly with a scraper or cardboard (the glue box will do)
- Let dry for 10 hours
- Put the skin protector and place them in your pack
So far it seems to work, the fresh glue layer is super sticky. I shall see in a week if that fixed my slipping skin problem, or if I destroyed them completely and need new ones.