How to Sharpen Skis

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Will from the Outspokin Bicycle and Sports shop, located in Newbury, New Hampshire. Today we're going to talk a little bit about how to sharpen skis. Before we get in to that, it's important to understand a few things about today's skis. Shape skis require what's called a base bevel, and that's basically how much edge material you take off on the base of the ski. So with out getting in to too much detail on that, what I'm going to be explaining to you is to spend as little time on the base edge, and, as you can, and the most time on the side edge as you can, because you can get a really sharp ski by maintaining your side edge, but you can really take a lot of your performance out of your ski if you drag your file too much on your base edge, and that's a lot different than what we used to have for skis, we'd spend a lot of time dragging a file on the base edge. But I am going to show you how to do that, so you know, you just want a mill-bastard file, you can get that at any hardware store, or any good shop will have one in stock for you in their waxing department. You want to have it so your tale, you're basically going to pulling the file from tip to tale on the ski. You want to have it so the tale of the file is pointing toward the tip, but you want to be on a forty-five degree angle across the edge of the ski, of the base of the ski. And you just apply pressure on the tip and tale of the file and pull, and just light pulls that overlap each other is really what you're trying to do. A nice firm, old toothbrush will help get a lot of the files out of your, the filings out of your file, and you do that every couple of passes, just to keep it clean, that's really helpful. When you go to do your side edge, you more or less take your same file and you do the same thing, you want to come across on a forty-five degree angle. You're going to pull from the tip to the tale, tale of the file goes toward the tip of the ski, and you're on a forty-five degree angle. And you just want to pull, and you're going to overlap your, your, your pull every time you go down, and lighter and more frequent strokes are the way to go there. So when you're happy with your sharp edge, you still have to follow up with basically a diamond stone. So the diamond stone is crucial, it's just as crucial as the file, because you'll have a lot of burrs that you won't even be able to see, you might be able to feel them if you run your hand lightly on the edge. But a diamond stone is just really a polishing stone, and you're going to basically duplicate what you were doing. Generally they're not long enough to go across the whole ski, so you more or less would just kind of make a couple of passes, overlapping down the base, and then flip up and do the same thing on the side edge, and that's going to take all the burrs off. If it still, you can feel burrs with your finger, just the weight of the diamond stone directly across the edge, pulling from tip to tale, will also take those burrs off, and not really dull your edge. If you're running a high performance shaped ski, don't worry about detuning, or dulling your tip and tale, but if you're running an intermediate ski that's not so high performance, then actually taking your diamond stone and just taking a little bit of the sharpness off your edge at the tip a couple inches down, and just a couple inches on your tale will allow a lot easier turn initiation in and out of your turns, just making your day a little bit more fun possibly, definitely more predictable. But the more aggressive you are, don't be afraid to leave that edge sharp, right up through. And that's, in a nut shell, how to sharpen your skis."