How to Wax a Surfboard

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Schell Michael. I'm here with Expert Village and today we're going to be doing a series on how to surf. Now we're going to go over the waxing portion of your board. You always want to have your board waxed. You never want to go out there in the lineup and you're slipping around. You can't sit on your board, you can't stand on your board, and it's just a total nightmare. So make sure you always got enough wax to go around on your board. Your best bet also is to wax up to maybe just where your chest rests or up until a certain point. They're definitely going to know you're a beginner if you're waxing tail to nose. You don't need to wax your whole board, mostly just like right here in this midsection, sometimes a little further up, and sometimes a little further back, depending on what kind of, style of riding you're going to be doing. Some people will put a little more on the nose if they have a long board and they're going to be hanging ten, but that will probably take a little while so you don't have to worry about that. Another thing besides wax that people use is something called a staunch pad or some people call it tech deck, grip, anywhere on the back, it's kind of like a foam pad. It goes right here in this section. It's usually shaped kind of like a triangle and that helps for your back foot to be stationed and not slip off the back and it kind of gives you an idea of where you're supposed to be standing. So when you wax your board, usually you can go in a circular motion. You just get a small piece of wax. You don't really need a huge block of it. Just break off a piece and you'll kind of just go just like this in a good circular motion. Some people like to have a space in the middle where they don't put any wax so they'll put wax where they're front foot goes. They'll put wax back here where they're back foot goes. So they'll leave that gap just to say okay this is where my feet are going to go just to stay on. You can do it that way, but for beginning you're going to want to probably just put it all over this whole area because you don't know where you're going to be standing. You could take off on a wave and try and be balancing and who knows. It's all good stuff. So, yeah, circular motion and once you get enough wax on there after using your board a few times, sometimes you can bust out a wax comb which looks exactly like a hair comb, but it's kind of just like a little shape like that and it has little teeth and it kind of goes just like this and it picks up the wax and then you kind of just smooth it out. There's a smooth side as well so you'll learn more about the wax comb the more you surf, but that's pretty much how you're going to wax your board. There's cold water wax, there's warm water wax, there's like tropical wax so if you're in the islands, it's a little bit more of a softer wax and depending on what temperature you're surfing you can always just look on the back, it'll let you know what kind of wax you're buying."