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Tuning your snowboard

Home Tuning vs. Board Shops

You will be surprised at all the things you can easily do yourself. All Basic Snowboard Maintenance, Repair and Tuning can be done at home with the right tools. However, if your board has taken serious damage like deep gouges in your base, you're better off leaving the repair to the professionals by bringing it to a Snowboard Shop.

You will be surprised at all the things you can easily do yourself. All Basic Snowboard Maintenance, Repair and Tuning can be done at home with the right tools. However, if your board has taken serious damage like deep gouges in your base, you're better off leaving the repair to the professionals by bringing it to a Snowboard Shop.

Convex and Concave Bases

The base of your Snowboard should be totally flat, not rounded. If your edges are higher than your base, then your base is convex. On the other hand, if the edges are lower than your base, then your base is concave. You can easily check the rounding of your base by placing a flat surface against your Snowboard and checking if there's light coming through the front view of your base.

Convex or concave bases are not that easy to fix. It would be better if you leave these operations to a Snowboarding shop. If you try to do it at home with just files and scrapers, you will probably end up with an uneven surface.

Base Maintainance

The base of your board needs to be smooth to keep your Snowboard gliding perfectly. These are the steps for Basic Base Maintenance:

1. Base Cleaning
a. Wipe off all the dirt of the surface with some cloth.
b. Apply a special base cleaner to the base of your Snowboard. Special Snowboard base cleaner will dissolve the wax and bring all kinds of impurities to the surface.
c. Let the cleaner evaporate for about 15 minutes and wipe the surface again.

2. Base Repair
If you have small gouges in your Snowboard surface you can repair those using a P-Tex candle. As explained above, larger gouges should be repaired by the experts. Light one end of the P-Tex candle and let drops of P-Tex into the gouges. Let the board and the P-Tex cool down and then use a scraper to scrape off the excess P-Tex and smoothen the surface.

3. Waxing
The most common misconception about Snowboards is that, with today's high-tech board bases, waxing is no longer necessary. On the contrary, those who Wax their Snowboard regularly and properly, glides better. To know the benefits of Waxing Your Snowboard and more information about waxing, go to our Snowboard Waxing section.

How to Wax Your Snowboard

There are several different ways to Wax your Snowboard. The easiest way is to let someone else (like your local board shop) do it. But, if you prefer to wax your board yourself the following are steps to guide you on How to Wax your Snowboard. Although there are different kinds of wax for different purposes, a general Snowboarding Wax will do the job in most cases.