Gearing up for your next trip to the mountains
by Paul Oberin
Owner Paul’s Ski Shop Wodonga
Before you make your next trip to the mountains it’s a good idea to take your skis and boots into a local ski shop and have the bindings checked with the boots in place, at Pauls ski shop I do this as a free service, I am surprised at just how many are set wrong, to a point where they are dangerous to the user.
The most common problem is the forward pressure, if this is set wrong you can get problems with pre release or in some cases movement of the boot within the binding while skiing, too much forward pressure can really wear out the bindings and see the release compromised to a point where they may not let you out when they should.
Hopefully at the end of last season you had your skis or snowboard tuned and a coating of wax for storage applied, if not now would be a good time to get that done so when the snow is here you avoid the mad rush that shops get, many of the better shops now use a higher performance, longer lasting wax as standard, we changed over last season to this better wax, the feedback has been very positive, we use a diamond file to retune edges, unless the edges are very neglected and in a very bad way, a diamond file doesn’t remove very much edge material, so you can get them done quite often without shortening the life of the ski, at Pauls ski shop, we check the existing edge bevel settings and make sure they remain as set, if we find they are set at a strange setting we ask questions, we have seen some strange settings at times.
For those who are having problems with ski or snowboard boots, I am happy at Pauls ski shop to spend some time before the season gets busy, looking at and discussing what could be the problem, I offer this as a free service, regardless of where they were purchased, once the snow is on the ground and the lifts open, I am too busy and would have to charge for my time, so get in early and make use of my boot fitting knowledge at no cost.
At this time of year it is a good idea to take your skis and boots into a local ski shop and have the bindings checked with the boots in place, at Pauls ski shop I do this as a free service, I am surprised at just how many are set wrong, to a point where they are dangerous to the user.
The most common problem is the forward pressure, if this is set wrong you can get problems with pre release or in some cases movement of the boot within the binding while skiing, too much forward pressure can really wear out the bindings and see the release compromised to a point where they may not let you out when they should.
Hopefully at the end of last season you had your skis or snowboard tuned and a coating of wax for storage applied, if not now would be a good time to get that done so when the snow is here you avoid the mad rush that shops get, many of the better shops now use a higher performance, longer lasting wax as standard, we changed over last season to this better wax, the feedback has been very positive, we use a diamond file to retune edges, unless the edges are very neglected and in a very bad way, a diamond file doesn’t remove very much edge material, so you can get them done quite often without shortening the life of the ski, at Pauls ski shop, we check the existing edge bevel settings and make sure they remain as set, if we find they are set at a strange setting we ask questions, we have seen some strange settings at times.
For those who are having problems with ski or snowboard boots, I am happy at Pauls ski shop to spend some time before the season gets busy, looking at and discussing what could be the problem, I offer this as a free service, regardless of where they were purchased, once the snow is on the ground and the lifts open, I am too busy and would have to charge for my time, so get in early and make use of my boot fitting knowledge at no cost.
