How does glide wax work

Blues, violets and greens are for cool to cold-as-hell conditions. Hinkley says that if you don't care to carry a snow thermometer with you at all times, in these parts one should go with a mid-temperature wax that has red or pink dye. These mid-range types seem to work best for our snow temperatures, he adds. And what does he say to people who still think waxing skis is an unnecessary frivolity? More in Winter Adventure The Science of Slickness: How and why road crews keep you safe in the snow The procedures and chemical reactions that give our icy roads traction.

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Get Social Facebook Twitter Instagram. The Source Weekly. Tweets by sourceweekly. Current Issue. November , Digital Edition ». Want to advertise with us? Give Guide Give Guide The Leaflet The Leaflet — Fall Best Of Best of Central Oregon. Restaurant Guide Restaurant Guide By mixing paraffin with microcrystalline waxes to make harder and more flexible formulas, Matsbo produced a series of three hard waxes and two klisters designed to provide a good combination of kick and glide across the entire range of cross-country snow conditions.

Because synthetic waxes were colorless, tasteless and odorless, Swix added pigments, with warm reddish colors for warm wet snow and cool blue-green colors for cold dry snow. You could blend the soft and hard waxes to cover intermediate conditions. The brand quickly grew popular and inspired competition; in time for the Helsinki winter games in , a group of young Finnish chemists established the Rex brand and gained wide acceptance. The concept caught on quickly amongst alpine skiers, too.

Both Holmenkol and Toko produced their own color-coded synthetic alpine waxes beginning in Because the materials were cheap and available worldwide, the new color-coded waxes inspired worldwide competition. In North America, dozens of skiers who had taken high school chemistry were able to brew their own wax lines.

Naturally, every major distributor wanted its own brand of wax, too. Lawrence and Tip-Top. Beginning in , alpine skis were sold with polyethylene bases branded as Kofix, P-tex or something similar. Racers continued to wax because even a two or three percent improvement could be the margin of victory—one percent on a two-minute course means 1.

In Swix moved its entire production to Norway, and in it was fully acquired by Ferd AS, a Norwegian company. Waxing for alpine glide speed was still a black art. As late as , despite the advent of polyethylene bases, slalom racers often applied melted wax with a paintbrush, the better to fill up the screw holes on their segmented edges. Over the next couple of decades, the European ski factories and alpine ski teams embarked on expensive research projects to improve glide speed.

For instance, it was theorized, and possibly proven, that at downhill racing speeds the heat of friction under the base created more water. A downhill racer might therefore need a slightly softer wax than, say, a GS racer in the same snow conditions. This level of investment made incremental knowledge very valuable. It could produce victory, which produced sales not only of skis and boots but of wax, too.

Figures from Snowsports Industries America show that in recent years, retail sales of ski wax in the U. These materials provided small but important performance improvements, especially as track-setting by increasingly heavy machines hardened the surfaces of cross-country racecourses. By fiberglass construction and plastic bases had arrived at the top of cross country racing, thanks largely to Kneissl and Fischer. The Austrian factories successfully promoted fiberglass race skis to top competitors, among them Thomas Magnusson, who won the 30k race at the Falun World Championships that year.

I got a glimpse of the secrecy-shrouded world of alpine ski waxing during the lead-up to the Olympic downhill in Lewis protected those skis from tampering and even inspection by stashing them under his bed when he slept.

Like his competitor tuners, he refused to discuss what might be in his wax mixtures. He once showed me his collection of waxes: a tray of small pots, each filled with a plain white wax and each labeled with a numerical code. However, two big advances in ski wax chemistry—surfactants and fluorocarbons—took place more or less out in the open, and well away from the alpine World Cup circus.

Terry Hertel was a recreational skier from the San Francisco area. To go with it he created a line of waxes. As a Lake Tahoe skier, Hertel was fascinated with the problem of glide in very wet snow.

In , on the advice of UC Davis chemistry professor Tim Donnelly, he added a surfactant to his paraffin wax to produce a universal wax he called Hot Sauce. A surfactant is a wetting agent, the exact opposite of a hydrophobic agent. But the stuff Hertel used, sodium dodecyl sulfate SDS , is an odd columnar molecule with a hydrophobic end. It's commonly used in toothpaste, shampoo and shaving cream as a foaming agent. Suspended in wax, SDS molecules clump into spheres, called micelles, with the hydrophobic end out, each sphere acting as a water-repellent ball bearing.

Town racers liked it. Hertel could never afford the fees to join the U. Ski Team supplier pool, let along send a technician to Europe, but he says he sent some surfactant wax to Europe with the team and is convinced it was an ingredient in the Diann Roffe and Eva Twardokens medals in GS at the Bormio World Championships in He tried polypropylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze used to keep ice cream from melting, and it worked.

But he also talked to Rob Hunter, a chemist at 3M, who mentioned that the company sold a liquid fluorocarbon to the cosmetics and paint industries—it dried to a smooth, glossy surface. Hertel wound up buying the 3M perfluorocarbon PFC liquid in five-gallon drums, mixed it into a high-strength candle wax called Paraflint, and in introduced a hard block wax he called Racing It was very hydrophobic, and very fast.

Perfluoro means that all the lateral links in the polymer chain, not just some of them, are capped with fluorine atoms. Meanwhile, at Swix, chief chemist Leif Torgersen was also looking for something to repel dirt. ERROR 1. ERROR 2. Password and Confirm password must match. If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership.

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Discount will be applied automatically at checkout. Your account has been created successfully, and a confirmation email is on the way. Most Popular in Business Is ammonia the fuel of the future? What is hand sanitizer, and does it keep your hands germ-free? These new textile dyeing methods could make fashion more sustainable. In , Norway was in an uproar. At the professional level, where races can be won by fractions of a second, ski wax choice plays a big role.

Because of this, it is a closely guarded secret that stays on the slopes. When applied to the bottoms of skis and snowboards, ski wax can help athletes and amateurs alike glide through sticky spring snow or schuss down icy slopes, depending on the formulation. In fact, recent studies have shown that PFAS contaminate the environment around ski resorts and the blood of ski technicians who often work there Environ.

So regulatory bodies such as the International Ski Federation are beginning to ban PFAS-containing ski waxes, kicking into gear a hunt for high-performance alternatives.

Back when skis were made of wood and worn not for competition but to get around in the cold snowy conditions of Scandinavia, skiers simply used animal fat or pine pitch and rosin to waterproof their wooden skis. By happy coincidence, sealing the wood against water also created a smooth, hydrophobic surface that helped the skis glide across the snow.

Today, from quick downhill races to cross-country treks and everything in between, skis and snowboards are coated in waxes to purposely reduce friction with the snow and make the ride faster. These waxes also now encapsulate a lot more science in their designs. Shelves are lined with various blends, some suited for this temperature or that and some suited to different sports. Most modern ski waxes are based on hydrocarbons. Users apply them to the bases of skis or snowboards, scrape off the excess, and then use a brush to give a smooth, hydrophobic surface.

The wax protects skis from scratches in addition to giving them their glide. In warm weather, soft waxes based on petroleum wax repel slushy snow and keep skis gliding.

On cold, hard snow, long-chain or branched alkanes protect the base of the ski, keeping it smooth and slick. For most skiers, the basic components are enough. But at the competitive level of world cup racing, where the margin between a good race and a win can be tiny, technicians have tinkered with ski waxes for years, adding materials such as graphite or metal powders to deliver any competitive edge they can.