Maplus Arctic Base 250g

£19.00

The best wax for Dry Slope usage. Gives the very best protection available.

Description

Maplus Arctic Base is a very hard paraffin wax designed primarily for skiing on  very cold and abrasive snows.

However, the innate hardness and strength of this wax makes it a perfect solution for a unique problem. The UK ski scene is quite focused around dry slopes due probably to our lack of mountains and stuff. (Scottish ski centres notwithstanding!)  

If you’ve ever skied on the nylon matting, you’ll know that the base of your skis can get very hot. To such an extent, that during aggressive skiing the ski bases can soften or even melt. A hard wax is a great protector and mitigator of this type of damage.  Arctic Base is hardest that I’ve found in many years of searching. Its melt point is 160 and Ptex bases are around 150! This does not  mean that you will melt your  bases by applying this wax! Keep your iron moving slowly and gently along the length of the ski and your ski base will not suffer heat damage. The sheer thermal mass of a ski, will prevent the temperature from rising this far (unless you leave the iron in one spot!) 

Care is pretty obviously required when running your iron at  these temperatures. For those without the benefit of a digital controlled tool, the old school way of setting the correct temp is to start with a setting at the low end of spectrum and gradually increase it by 5° or a click at a time. You’ll have the right setting when you melt the wax easily, without smoke. When I see skiwax irons with a crust of brown baked wax around the sides, I just know that the skis, the wax and the tools have been mightily abused. 

Put this wax on quite generously, let it go totally cold and polish the surface with a fairly stiff brush. This method should last for an hours hard dryslope training. 

For a speedier finish, you should apply, cool, scrape with a freshly sharpened scraper and polish well. This will give you a  lovely shiny fast surface. Rotobrushes are superb tools  alongside this type of hard wax. Use a firm horsehair at 800-1200 rpm, followed by a few passes with a softer rotobrush for the very fastest base finish.

On hard icy snows a low fluoro top coat would be a great match. In warmer conditions a softer base wax would be a better choice. With increasing humidity a higher flouro wax is the sensible choice. Arctic base really comes into its own as a base wax  for cold dry snow conditions, where conventional basewaxes fail due to abrasion.

 

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