Waxing- very important thing for our boards. Well waxed board is faster and the slide is better protected against external factors. Our board will be well waxed only if we know how to do it.

You need some things for waxing: iron, wax, sander, brush, cloth and cork. In the beginning we must gather all needed tools. We will need an iron with a bottom made of stainless steel. You can take an iron from your mother but you must remember that clothes ironing will be impossible then with this iron. Next very important tool is sander- this tool will help us to pull down the wax excess from the slide. The best for this is a narrow, metal sander. Next very important thing is wax obviously, which will be put on the slide. Presently there are many kinds of wax avaliable on the market. Among them there are cold and hot waxes. I don’t recommend using spray wax or and other waxes of dry use, because they aren’t meltable, and that is why they don’t penetrate the board slide correctly. These waxes have very short vitality and they don’t give adequate isolation between the slide and water drops. We can use them only on the board which is already greased in hot. Then your board will be much faster. Whereas among waxes put on cold we differentiate 3 kinds:

• Universal - it is used in every snow conditions
• Cold - for the frost snow, temperature below zero
• Hot - for the wet snow, temperature above zero

To give our board the last cut, we need brush and cloth for polishing. When the temperature of the snow is low we use a cork to do it. The waxing process looks like this: we lay our board with the slide turned up. Next we warm up the iron, setting it on the medium degree. When the iron is hot enough we press on it a wax cube. We put melt and leaking wax steadily on the all surface of the slide. You must remember to appraise the amount of the wax very well- it is always better to start with a smaller amount, because we can possibly add more wax later. Next we make our iron less hot, not ot burn the wax. We press iron to the slide and we make circular moves in order to distribute our wax very precisely everywhere on the slide. It is essential that our slide should be hot all the time, during all the waxing, because a wax must penetrate P-Tex pores. After finishing your work you should put your snowboard away for about 20 minutes. Now we can relax and in this time our board will cool down a little. We should cool our board down in a room temperature. We shouldn’t put it in the snow. Maybe it is faster but it may do harm to our board. (it’s just like drinking cold pepsi after hot tea- heaven for your teeth:P)

When we are already relaxed we can go back to the work. We must remove the excess of cooled down wax with a use of sander. Sander should be very sharp- it will make our work easier. We must attach our board very firmly, best both on the back and on the front. We start on the nose. While pressing the sander with both our hands we lead it along the slide, to the back. We must lead the sander on the surface of the slide. After finishing we watch the slide very precisely and we remove wax remains (especially on the nose and on the tail because there it is the most difficult to remove a wax). Next we clean a slide withe the use of a brush. In the end we polish it with a cloth. If we are going to ride in a very low temperatures we can use a cork to polish the slide. Thanks to it our slide will be very smooth and very fast on the frosty snow. Next to this traditional method with iron and a bit of wax, we have at our disposal some newnesses like a paper imbibed with a wax. We spread this paper on the slide and we iron it. Wax is penetrating the slide and we don’t have to tire ourselves with a sander. It’s fast method but not the cheapest one.This paper is certainly very useful during a leave in a hotel or guest-house, where we can’t use this traditional method.