snowboard waxing?

Question
Hi I'm kind of new to snowboarding and had a question about waxing my board. I just bought a brang new board and don't know whether or not I have to get it waxed before I start riding. Some have told me that I don't have to wax it yet, because most likely it's already prewaxed by the factory. So should I get my board waxed or not before I use my snowboard for the fist time?

Answer
Hi Roy,

Great Question- the short answer is Yes, Definitely.

Here's the longer answer:

You may want to do more than just wax it. After a board is pressed, it continues to cure for a while, and off-gasses solvents both from the heat of the mold, and from the catalysis occurring while the epoxy cures. It's shape changes several times during the process. At one point, manufacturers tuned the boards soon after pressing, resulting in boards that were far from flat, and requiring an entire re-tune to ride their best. Today, most manufacturers have caught on- some leave the boards to cool in the presses, others do not tune the boards until they have had plenty of time to find their final form, and then almost all of them stone grind their boards flat.

You'll notice I said "most", and "almost". It's not a bad idea to check your board with a true bar (a carpenters square will work in a pinch)before your first ride. If it's got a few waves in the base, that's no problem- but if the whole board is base or edge high, you'll want to get it ground first. It's not just that it might ride poorly, but that a flat board is a consistent place to return at each sharpening- it's not possible to reproduce the base deviations that occur in curing, right... If the board needs a full tune, then it'll get wax in the process.

OK, let's assume your base is flat from the factory. Stone ground bases look pretty darn shiny when new- it's not until they've had some friction that they'll oxidize, turn hairy, and white. You can't really tell if it's got wax unless it has some wax dust on it. The factory waxes the board using a friction waxer- basically a scotchbrite pad on a wheel, with a heater underneath it. The board gets run over it, and the wax is both applied and scraped in one step.

That's great for protecting the board from oxidation, and for helping to glide- but it fails at one major benefit to waxing- that is, a real hot-waxing fills the amorphous zones, or pores that exist in a sintered base. A sintered base is harder than an extruded, or sheet base, because it is made by pressing pellets of High Density Polyethylene together under heat, and then scything off a layer of base material. Sintered bases have areas between the compressed pellets that hold wax well. When you hot wax, you fill the pores with wax, making the base even denser, while also providing a lubricant against damage from abrasion. Rocks and rails and such can't get a grip on the plastic.

I wax my new gear with a base layer of the hardest (cold temperature) wax I can get- with NO Fluoro. Toko or Swix Blue, MACH II Blue from KUU sport, or Hertel Super Hot Sauce will all do the job. Then I leave them base-up on saw horses in my furnace room, to let the wax sink in overnight. Then I wax with for conditions (wax rarely lasts more than a day or two when you carve a lot, 3-4 if you ride flat). I most often use Holmenkol Red, or Hertel Racing 739 until spring- when I switch to a softer wax with graphite in it to repel grease and dirt. Dominator makes some of the best graphite waxes.

So that's the long answer. You'll want to wax regularly (including before your first ride) to keep your board riding at it's best.