February 12, at am. The chemistry of ski wax. The fastest skiers usually have the fastest skis. And speedy skis need their bottoms waxed with the right stuff. All ski wax is not the same.
A wetter snow, for instance, will require a different wax than dry fluff. And downhill racers get a different recipe than cross-country skiers. Chemicals in the wax help skis glide downhill.
The wax does this by repelling water that forms as a ski slides across the snow. Cross-country skiers, in contrast, must go both uphill and downhill. Their ski wax, therefore, must help the athlete also grip the snow while climbing short hills during a race.
One type of wax makes skis slippery. Another makes it grip. A racer who uses the wrong formula risks lagging behind. Maybe it gets colder. Or starts snowing. It may even rain. Seriously, take a pea-sized amount of wax, and rub a thin layer into your base, okay you may need more than a pea depending on your ride and turn that frown upside down.
While attending a race the powerful race leader caught my attention. What grabbed my eye was they were one with their equipment; no effort wasted. A model of total efficiency. Silently gliding atop a silvery track of snow with a pack of skiers in their wake. After the medal ceremony, which they took gold, I felt compelled to inquire as to what made them so fast.
Then I saw the Fast Wax in their wax box. When the snow is wet enough to make a decent snowball, there is enough moisture in the snow to start flying across it using Fast Waxes, High Speed Fluorocarbon wax. Fluorocarbons turn snow into ball bearings, so you better be ready for some serious speed. This is the same company that happened to perfect Fluorocarbon technology right in Fast Waxes back yard. Kelly has trained harder than anyone can imagine and won more races than can be counted.
Event organizers know they should order the gold medal with Kelly on it. Just to save time. Other athletes assume Kelly is cheating by using rocket-powered skis. When the humidity increases slightly causing the snow to transition from dry powdery snow to slightly damp. Terry continued his research, developing the first ever fluorocarbon ski wax, Racing FC in That same year, thanks to extensive studies, he invented Spring Solution, a wax designed to repel pollen and dirt in the warmer spring temperatures.
In Terry patented and trademarked the fastest ski wax in the world, White Gold. Any wooden structure exposed to water needs to be protected from drenching. The earliest known preservative was pine tar, often called pitch. The Phoenicians certainly used it for sealing amphorae, among other things.
The stuff was produced by distilling scraps from the lumber trade—often the roots—in a pit covered with peat, or in a funnel-shaped kiln. A ton of wood, burned slowly in a nearly oxygen-free container, produced about pounds of charcoal and about 50 gallons of mixed turpentine, pitch and rosin. The pitch was pine tar. The earliest literary reference to ski preparation found by the Norwegian historian Jakob Vaage was a history of Lapland written in Latin by Johannes Scheffer and published in English translation in Scheffer reported that Sami skiers used pine pitch and rosin.
That recipe is pretty good for running on the flat. For good glide, the important issue is that the wood repel water. Water beads on it nicely, forming droplets instead of sheets. This means that at a microscopic level, the ski glides not on a sheet of water, nor on hard-point snow crystals, but on the equivalent of tiny liquid ball bearings, mixed with a lot of air.
One of the first skills you learned as a new skier was to boil pine tar without burning it, and to paint it onto a hickory base. As a running surface, pine tar was supplanted only in the s, with the development of cellulose surfaces, and then in the s by polyethylene. As late as the s, when I started skiing, a good ski shop still reeked pleasantly with the sharp resinous scent of boiled pine tar, because we were still using it on the wood cross-country skis of the era.
If all you were interested in was glide, pine tar could be improved with a temporary coat of some waxy substance.
They sought faster glide, and that meant improving the water-repellency of their pine-tar bases. By , they were trying anything they could find that seemed slick: glycerin, whale oil, kerosene, candle wax and, famously, spermaceti, the waxy goop harvested from the heads of sperm whales. Until around , ski meets held in Norway and elsewhere in Europe required a competitor to jump on the same skis that he used for cross-country.
Then, as jumps became longer and cross country skiing faster, skimakers began building narrower, lighter running skis, while jumping skis grew straighter, wider and heavier. Looking for higher take-off speeds, jumpers began painting their bases with a variety of hard water-repellent shellacs, and in wet conditions might paint on a thin layer of paraffin.
The word is of German origin and means glue or adhesive; it was a mix of paraffin, pine resin, venetian turpentine and shellac, packaged in tubes and meant specifically to improve kick in wet snow. Klister was a sensation. Gunnar Kagge, writing in Aftenposten in , recalls that during the Depression he and his friends cooked up their own klisters using beeswax, resin, melted phonograph records and bicycle innertubes, and occasionally blew up a kitchen.
On the alpine side, in a new wax factory in Stuttgart introduced candles and shoe polish products under the brand Loba. At the same time it introduced a durable ski-base coating labeled Holmenkol-Mix—it was a season-long varnish rather than what we would recognize as a daily wax. The brand name was Toko. The 10th Mountain Division was issued waxes for three or four temperature ranges, each imprinted with the warning that they should not be applied with heat.
The waxes were clearly the byproducts of industrial processes: One of the manufacturers had, as its main business, the production of torpedo fuses.
By that time synthetic waxes were predictable, stable, plentiful and cheap byproducts of petroleum refining. Paraffin sold for pennies the pound, and was widely used in hundreds of consumer products, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and even baked goods it was used in place of pricey butter to make baking pans slippery. 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.
0コメント