When do snowboards need to be waxed

If you wax your board regularly, your board will stay as fast and fresh as a daisy. Press the wax on your heated iron above your snowboard. The wax will liquify and pour off of the iron and on to your board. Draw a line with the liquid droplets on your board near the edge closest to you. Make sure you run the wax the entirety of the boards length. You want a hot iron that melts the wax quickly, but not too hot that the wax begins to smoke when in contact with the iron.

As soon as you get to the end of your snowboard with the drip line. Press your iron onto your snowboard and start going back and forth along the drip line. You can push the wax in as hard as you like, just make sure to spread it.

The harder you push the wax into your snowboard base, the more the wax will seep into each P-tex pore. The trick is to get the board nice and warm.

Feel the underneath of the board to ensure the iron is not too hot and the board does not overheat. If the top sheet feels warm but not hot and the wax is nicely spread out, move onto the other side of your board.

Do another drip line making sure its 1cm in width along the other edge of your snowboard and repeat the same motions as before. Push the iron and wax into your base with smooth back and forth strokes. If needed, go in a circular motion to push the wax into the board. This can help get the wax into the pores, because a base of a snowboard is never fully flat, so you may need to force the wax into base from different angles.

Now that you have waxed the edges of your board, melt wax in a drip line down the middle of your snowboard. Make the drip line a bit thicker for the middle cm wide as you have more surface area to cover.

Do this by slowing down how fast you move long the board. Once finished, wipe over the base with a cloth to remove any remaining residue. Pick your wax. Melt the wax. Warm up the iron to a medium heat and then hold the wax against the iron until it starts to melt the wax at a slow drip. Iron the base. Next, place the iron on the base of the board and move it around in a circular motion.

Leaving the board in one place is how you can end up damaging your base permanently. Let the wax cool. Leave the wax on the board for approx minutes, until it has cooled down and set. Get scraping.

Once the wax has cooled, hold your plastic scraper at a 45 degree angle and carefully work from nose to tail, scraping off any excess wax. Wax also lets you deal with changing snow conditions. Colder snow is more slippery than warmer snow. By changing the type of wax you use, you can better match shifting conditions. In addition to changing temperatures, there are some other factors you need to know about when deciding how often you should wax your board. Ice can quickly scrape off a good coat of wax, and if you regularly ride on lots of ice, I would say you should wax your board about once a week.

Type of Base — There are two main snowboard base types: sintered and extruding. Sintered bases are made of a material that will naturally absorb more wax because they have tiny holes that soak it up. This means that sintered bases will need to be waxed more often than extruding ones.

Your Need for Speed — A freshly waxed board is always going to be faster than a board that has even a few days of use on its wax job. The easiest way to tell if your board needs wax is by feel.

Luckily, there are a few other ways to see if you need new wax.