If you are a professional snowboarder, then you know how important your snowboard is for you. If you want to be on the safer side and achieve great performance, properly taking care of your base should be at the top of your priority list. Never leave your snowboard aloof, as a thief can easily steal your unlocked board. So, always use snowboarding locks to prevent the thieves from snatching your expensive snowboard. Also, keep repairing your snowboard periodically.
Though the surface level scratches can be properly handled with the base grind by any professional shops, you should pay more attention to the core shots or deeper scratches as it would interfere while you are riding and would be a big threat to your snowboard. These core shots won't be able to restrict water to get into the inner layers, which would cause the layers to delaminate. It will eventually affect your performance as well. Hence, if you want your snowboard to support you at all times, you should devote your valuable time to caring for it without any second thought.
Do you want to know about snowboarding repair? Let's understand how you can repair your snowboard on your own.
Steps to Repair your Snowboard
Bring your equipment
Before you start repairing your snowboard, you should gather all your equipment first on the table. It will make your task easier and comfortable. Make sure you have your P-Tex candle, scraper, lighter, blade on your table. If you do not have the right equipment now, then you can get the snowboard repairing quality equipment from Amazon at a reasonable price.
Clean and Prepare your Base
You need to properly clean your base by removing all the dirt particles and wax from the bottom of your snowboard. It would be better for you to get a knife and start removing any base plastic contaminated with rock fragments. Try to apply the citrus cleaner to the bottom of your snowboard. It would help in cleaning the bottom of your snowboard base and make it smoother. This step for snowboarding repair should be done very carefully so that the board doesn't get scratched at all.
After doing this, you need to scrub the board bottom area to remove all the old wax and various other impurities and dirt. You should remember that if you are not doing this step, then you would be wasting your precious time.
Start Applying the P-Tex
You should be very careful when your P-Tex is hot because it would stick to anything quickly. First, light a regular wax candle and keep it nearby. It is always better to go for a constant flame than a lighter at the time of working with P-Tex.
Now, you can take a stick of P-Tex and properly hold it over the flame until it glows blue - then drip the P-Tex carefully into any damaged area of your snowboard. Make sure you are having a metal scraper or wood scraper nearby always to soak up the initial drops. Also, keep in mind to protect the good bindings for snowboarding fitted on your board from P-Tex.
Once your P-Tex melts continuously, you can move it over the gouge quickly and fill all the space with the drips. You should always keep the flame low to the snowboard to decrease the chances of carbon getting a mix. Re-light the P-Tex and repeat the process if it gets mixed out with carbon. Now leave your snowboard to cool down. Remember, the deeper the gouge is, the more layers you will need to fill.
Scrap the Board
The next step is to scrap excess P-Tex material from the wound sides using the knife or metal board scraper. You should be very careful at the time of scraping it. Make sure you are not scraping it too much. Otherwise, the snowboarding repair technique will be of no use.
The scraper is only helpful in removing base material. Try to use your finger to feel the smoothness of snowboard. After scraping properly, there should be no surfaces or raised bumps on the snowboard base. If you found any bumps or raised portions, then you need to scrape more thoroughly.
Sharpen Edge
You need to make the grinding tool flat on the metal edge of your snowboard. Also, try to slide over the whole snowboard length and remove all the catches on the travel. Now you have to go for the bottom metal edge and again need to look for grinding tools. It should be flat on the metal edge.
Apply the Hot Wax
You should always set the iron to a medium heat range to apply wax on your snowboard. Remember, once you have used the iron for waxing, then you should never use it for clothing. Also, try to avoid prolonged heat exposure and high heating settings on your iron at the time of waxing the snowboard. It can completely damage the core of your snowboard.
Scrape the Wax
Once the applied wax becomes cool, then you need to start scraping the excess wax with the help of plastic wax scraper only. You should remember that it would take a while, so be patient. You should scrape hardly and too much. Make sure you are not scraping the bare plastic, and always leave a residual wax. The surface should be smooth enough that it doesn't create any friction between the snow and the board while riding.
Conclusion
At last, you are finally aware of the above mentioned vital steps which you should consider whenever you are going for snowboarding repair. By following these steps, you would be able to repair your snowboard easily on your own. All your equipment should be of high quality.
Also, to protect your snowboard from any damage, you need to keep checking the board edges. If they look damaged, too sharp or blurred, you need to file them to make them better. You can use some filling for easily fixing of any damages to the edges. If you found any breakage or major change, then you need to start repairing your snowboard. You can search ârepair shops for Snowboarding near me' on Google for accessing the nearby repair stations. So, what are you waiting for? Start repairing your snowboard now!