Do Skis Get Blunt?

You can see in this video that the interaction of the ski with the snow is much more than just the edge of the ski. I really doubt the fine tuning of the edge matters that much.

I don’t think there is any objective way to settle this debate. I think if you enjoy tuning skis, go for it. I like sharpening knives and tools so I get it. But I don’t bother with my skis.

Do you mean .5 or 5 for the base bevel? 5 is quite far off the snow.

I can tell you are very proud of your U12 boy and from that video, you should be. His fundamentals are rock solid. His fore-aft is good, his timing is excellent, he's clearly prepared for the course well in inspection. He's generally not reaching to cross-block, as evidenced by the strategic inside-clear at the top of the pitch. Really, really strong.

Son is U16, same 87/0.5 and if I am not doing them well, he will tell me as he can feel the difference. Of course, we have race and training skis, this helps having the race skis very well tuned.

Your son is good :-)

Yeah, I grew up with skis, but I don't think I have ever heard of anyone sharpening the edges. Waxing the skis yes.

"Riding big fat powder skis everyday, inside and outside of the resort? More or less doesn't matter."

Until you stop off at the bar on a Sunny day and ride home on dusk once everything has frozen again, then you'd be like "oh I wish I didn't tell everyone not to keep their edges in decent shape", as you fly off the cliff edge.

Ski here in the northeast or midwest and on the ice we get? You're going to want sharp edges.

I detuned my edges under the boot area when I was younger and only focused on park skiing. Catching an edge on a box or rail was a fear I had. Never tuned the edges on any of my twin tips. I did wax them though!

For park or intermediate on ice, I would still give them a decent tune but use a one degree base bevel, that'll rarely hook but give a lot of confidence on ice.

Another important tuning dimension is base structure. I never realized the impact of base structure until I got a GS board that had been ground with a very aggressive base. That thing absolutely flies on wet snow.

It has to not be impractical to go through this ritual after skiing (try doing this with two or three young, tired kids in tow)

Anecdotally I do all the routine waxing and edge maintenance on my family's (wife and two kids) skis, and it's not that big a deal. Slightly less of a hassle than bringing gear to the shop to do it would be for me, and the kids enjoy hanging out with some hot cocoa and helping a bit. Once you have everything in your workspace set up right, it goes pretty fast.

I'm no expert in this, but I think one common misconception among regular skiers is that a ski tune is "free" rather than each ski only gets so many full tunes as it wears down the base and edges. Obviously, if you get a core shot or something like that, it becomes more necessary. I always understood waxing skis as more protective though?

One thing the conversation seems to be missing is rocks and handling.

Rocks are mostly an off-piste issue, but I have seen it happen on piste. Especially early and last season when cover can be low. Will occasionally also happen near the lift when a spot gets warn low. When I get rock gashes, it's always easier to just send them to the shop's machine.

Handling also introduces a fair amount of nicks. In theory, the edges should never meet at an awkward angle, but it happens. Skis slide around on the rack, skis flip out a position while carrying them, things shift in the car, etc, etc.

Nice clarification about the polishing once you have it setup. This is fairly quick to do too.

Same with cycling. When I lose enough weight and get so fast that I have to change my clothes to get faster, then I will clip in if I need to win a race.

Most definitely sharp edges, and your bevels, matter when you are really pushing it, especially if you are racing, and most especially if you are on extremely hard or even water-injected snow.

I have to ask, as someone into alpine touring and ski mountaineering (but not racing), what difference would backcountry skiing make to this advice? I imagine you'd need sharpening more often, due to twin factors of A) more rock and hard ice and B) really wanting that control on ungroomed (ie, icy) slopes at high angles.

I don't consider myself "really pushing it", but would like to have every ounce of control I can get when heading downhill. I'm enough of a beginner that I will often side-slip or even just hike completely down a slope I don't like the looks of.

I have been an Austrian trained ski instructor since 2012 and I can tell you that a sharp ski is essential if you want to have carve in any conditions below where the snow isn't slushing or soft. I.e. any run that is either early day, windblown, mid-season (generally colder) or shadow side.

HOWEVER 99% of the skiers on a mountain (and yes I mean 99%) do not actually ski on their edges, they do skidded turns (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4hioJ4ThJA). And the same 99% will typically just slide off of hard and icy parts of a slope as they aren't comfortably riding their edge. To these people sharp edges matter, but less than to the few who successfully carve.

But if you are within that 1% of skiers that do ski mostly on the edge, then a sharp edge is extremely important; you see true carving technique is a delicate skill:

In order to carve properly you need to need to get your skis in a steep angle with the snow, which means you need to get your feet in a steep angle, which can only be maintained if you move your center of gravity into a position that isn't above your feet. Which effectively means your body is in a position that is out of balance. Similarly to how sprinting essentially is just leaning forwards and playing "catch up" with our legs, carving technique tries to do the same. Exception being that we use the rhythmical centripetal forces of turns and the resistance of the snow to create the balancing force (https://d3t7modobimpp4.cloudfront.net/uploads/_1200xAUTO_fit...).

And this is why edges matter; because if the centripetal force provided from the carving turn isn't generated because the skis blunt edges cause them to slip, then instead of generating movement towards the skiers body (reestablishing balance), the skis will drift away from the skiers body (removing balance) resulting in poor turns if not slipping down onto ones hip.

TL;DR: Very good skiers NEED sharp edges to ski well. Most skiers will be fine. (As a matter of fact I think 99% of all skiers will do just fine on ANY ski, and make more significant improvement from 2 days of ski school than any equipment upgrade or tuning that money can buy).

Try taking a slice out of a block of ice with a butter knife. Try again with a sharp butchers blade.

The difference is quite pronounced.

does it get blunt enough to affect performance

Edges matter on ice. And yes, the difference is noticable (if the edga has been blunt "enough").

On hard packed snow and ice, the difference is pretty stark. On softer snow or powder, the difference is substantially less noticeable.

It doesn't just affect performance, blunt edges make skiing down icy patches impossible. The effect is so pronounced that if you do enough skiing in a day you'll notice a difference even at the end of that day.

The effect of a newly sharpened ski is noticeable immediately even if you're an absolute beginner. Even moreso if you're on a snowboard.

Source: 30 years of skiing and snowboarding.

That assumes that most of the snow is actually fallen from the sky.

In central european ski resorts, largest parts of ski lopes are not natural snow anymore (or are mostly mixed natural/artificial). And artificial snow has far more sharp crystals than natural snow.

Above -37, Snow needs particulates to form.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...

The most important type of ice nuclei is mineral dusts blown into the atmosphere from deserts, arid lands, and agricultural fields. The International Mineralogical Association (IMA) defines minerals as naturally occurring solid substances formed in geological processes.

IIRC snow makers use particulates too.

Moh's scale is useful for field identification of minerals. It's not really useful as an all-purpose predictor of durability.

Pressure is a huge variable. In a typical Moh's test, there is very little: just a person rubbing two stones together by hand. But with enough pressure, liquid water (hardness: none) can cut steel. Lead can damage steel or quartz if fired out of a gun. Etc.

And as others have mentioned, snow might have particles of other materials in it as well. But just to be clear: Moh's scale does not mean that pure ice could never abrade steel.

My guess is two things:

1. All snow has some level of particulates, especially older snow (moreso if there has been melting, because the particles/dirt/whatever concentrate on top).

2. Cornering on piste would put pretty big stresses on the tip of the edge. This could perhaps cause the edge to bend and curl, or even break little pieces off from metal fatigue. I think this would be a bigger deal in most winter skiing conditions.

Twenty days is still pretty serious, $1500 for a pass or $150 for a day ticket, gas, gear etc. So pay for at least one tune per year, maybe even three if you ski groomers with groomer type skis a lot.

An effective way to test your bindings - put your skis on at a flat area and with boots done up, dig your edge in and try to twist your boot out of the ski binding with your own muscular power. It will hurt a bit and be hard to do, but if you can't, you need to lower your din.

I'll take 20 days! Sounds amazing. Generally get a week in a year - but in the Alps, so pretty good.

You will see rust on your edges if you leave them wet and don't wipe them off. It can be removed with a soft gummy stone. A thick layer of wax left on the skis and edges keeps them rust free over the summer. Typically done for race skis or higher end skis.

I don't worry about corrosion much, but I'm tuning the skis I use on ice every couple of days.

My powder skis get waxed every few days, edges only to set up the angles once. Maybe once a season after that or to fix as best I can when hitting rocks.

Not sure how you managed to destroy a pair of skis? It's mainly just to clamp the file onto a metal piece with the correct angle and grind away. Normally I put pen marks every few cms on the edge before I begin, then all those should disappear and I know I've grinded about the same all places.

Or with a tool like Swix TA3008 it's hard to do wrong. Maybe need someone to set up the base angles, but then you can use it to touch up for years.

A local shop might as well make things worse if they do not care too much and give your skis the standard treatment (e.g. different angle than before). Once you have a good edge, it's kind of similar as keeping a knife sharpened. No need to really grind every time, a fine polishing after skiing for a day is more than sufficient and makes your edges last a long time. Been using tools from here for 10+ years, they also have informative instructions: https://www.tooltonic.com/

Because while snow is soft and fluffy when it first falls, after a few temperature changes and having been groomed and skied on for hours/days, it transforms from snow crystals to ice crystals. Unless new snow falls on top, that's what you're gonna be skiing on, and you'll slide all over the place without sharp edges.

Here is one of the best skiers in the world, on a race course set on a surface intentionally prepared to be solid ice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIHdHUg1FC4

To dig into snow (and sometimes ice) to turn and/or brake.

25 mm became Vogue and cycling because wind tunnel testing showed it was superior in aerodynamics combined with a new carbon clincher rims

If I recall correctly

Are there studies that show that ski tuners are more susceptible to some specific diseases, and that it can be tied to particular chemicals, PFAS in particular.

That would be interesting, as all the worries about PFAS is more along the lines of "it may be bad, and if it is we are screwed as we have dumped so much of it in nature and it doesn't degrade", but concrete evidence is still lacking today.

Note that overheated PTFE is bad, but we are talking over 250°C, which is, I believe, way less than the temperatures used by ski tuners.

Yes, we used to wear a p100 respirator with those waxes. Many didn't. Can't purchase them any more and I'm glad because they were crazy expensive

A rental should be able to sharpen them if you address it. (And at least here in Europe all rentals sharpen their skis frequently enough).

A good tester is to see if the skis edge grips the surface of your finger nail, the same way you would test a knife or a sharp tool (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHEuV2CPE3w). If it slides across it with no friction, then it's a blunt ski.

Personally, I would advice against trying to tune skis manually, because you might just as easily blunt the edge as you might sharpen it if you don't have a good jig and tools.

Through my 12 years of teaching skiing, I will say that more often than not people who complain about icy conditions are held back by their technique; are you skid steering or carving, because when you are skid steering no level of ski tuning can make your edges stay on hard snow. (Tip: This guy has made an incredible amount of videos about the topic and has even himself progressed from being a skid steering freestyle skier to now being an excellent carver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwWFlltWQTU).

snowboards too

...metal edges which apparently have to be sharpened from time to time, or not, as the case may be.

We could talk for pages about wax. Your father is partly right, it does wear off quickly, especially if you apply it correctly.

I'd say wax is important in that it prevents the base from oxidizing. A dried out base is more difficult to turn and slower.

Structure (small grooves in the base) will make you a second faster)

Wearing a race suit vs a normal tight coat will make you two seconds faster.

Proper setup edges vs no tune rounded edges will make you 5-6 seconds faster and with much lower chances of dsq.

The type of wax is much less important. In a slalom race, choosing the best wax vs a less perfect type might only improve you by 0.02 seconds on a sixty second long race.

Switching to more aggressive edge angles (1° base, 3° side from 0° base, 1° side) on my snowboard made a huge difference. I can lock in a carved turn much easier on ice and don't catch my tails or any other sketchiness in slow floating transitions across the board. I think most of the improvement is attributable to base bevel, and I agree with your assessment that freshness of sharpening is important. I hit my edges with a fine grit stone and a gummy stone every morning before heading out, and by afternoon they're noticeably more dull and hold less well. One test you can do to measure this is to drag the top of your fingernail across the edge in a perpendicular manner. If the edge is sharp it'll shave a little ribbon of fingernail off, if it isn't it won't. I only ever use a file to change angles or if I need to take a bunch of material off to fix a large rock gouge (like something that would require also ptex repair). I ride a Tanker 201 with Upz hardboots and F2 plates.

If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all you have to do is keep them dry.

Stopped reading around there. He actually took a microscope to verify what should be common sense for anyone with a basic understanding of physics. And then didn't even do it properly like you point out.

Is it only my perception or are people getting more gullible/stupid? It's something I notice more and more, someone says something obviously ridiculous but instead of dismissing it and filing the person under 'nutter', my feeling is more and more misinformation is taken serious or at least considered as potentially true. Or maybe it's an increasing lack of social skills? Maybe there's a decreasing understanding of the fact that the chance of running into a random guy telling tall tales, being misinformed or outright crazy is high when you're out somewhere with hundreds of people.