I have decided to look after my own skis and not rely on the shops.
Please feel free to contradict my opinions.
1. In resort if I just hand over my skis to a small random resort shop to wax my skis over night. They will slap the cheapest new wax on top the old dirty wax without thorough cleaning. I read someone saying that is what they do. It seems to me that is all they can do. A proper job takes too long when they have a lot of skis to do. The big shops/chains/resort just hand the skis over to their giant ski processing machine, great for when hundreds of hire skis but not for my personal ski.
2. If I hand it over to my local shops for a 'full service' (~£35) they are too happy to grind to remove problems on the base. This shortens the life of the skis and the ability of the base to take up wax because there is less of it. This was certainly the case with the shop I used to use.
3. I will learn a rewarding skill my doing it myself. I might be capable doing a better job myself. For example when I build a bike I use thread locks and other assembly compounds that the LBS only does on command.
4. After the initial outlay on tools I will start to save money. It seems to me this obvious. A youtube waxing tutorial suggested that I might get as many as ten pairs of skis waxed from a single 180g bar of wax. Looking at a Fischer demonstration the skilled race tuner hot scraped three times to clean the ski. I only expect to hot scrape once so I might expect to do my skis four or five times from a 12 euro bar of wax. It costs me 10/15 euro to get a shop to do it.
So far I have just bought a Swix wax kit (
www.xspo.de/artikel/swix-wax-set-alpin-8-teilig.html) and a ski vice (
www.xspo.de/artikel/swix-t149-50-world-cup-skihalterung.html) (a long time to get my money back). My ski does not need edges done for my late March trip (maybe in the first hour of the morning). I will look at edge maintenance and base repair in the Autumn for next season.
For my mid-March trip I plan to use my Swix CH8 red hydrocarbon wax from the kit for -4 to +1. Or should I ignore it, use it as a cleaning wax and use a universal wax?
What wax do you use?
Swix and Toko seem a little pricey to me. Is is there any problem using the lesser known makes? I am only a recreational skiing and have no interest in the high fluro waxes.