mca80 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2023 8:48 pm
Manney wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2023 7:33 pm
mca80 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2023 7:17 pm
Don't most skis leave the manufacturer with enough of some kind of wax to protect them from sitting in a showroom?
Nope. Not a drop. It would be a mess. Attract dirt, melt sitting dockside in a sea container in late summer (when most skis start to ship). Would cause problems at the retail end having to wipe everything down with base cleaner. That or deal with some hysterical shopper mom/dad who gets ski wax on their knockoff designer jeans.
Doesn’t matter in most normal cases. Ptex is fresh, still off gassing, on a new ski. But years of sitting around dry in a stockroom? No esta bien.
A mess? It's ironed in.
Attract dirt? Wax _repels_ dirt.
Melt? Neptune gets their Asnes shipment mid/end of Nov. Not hot at all.
If you buy skis and pay the retailer to prep the bases and they don't clean them first, you got something wrong going on.
You know what, f this. You are not worth responding to. For every good informative point you have 9 that are full shit but backed by the utmost arrogance and with zero crtitical reflection when given counterpoints that may prove you wrong or at the very least question your position. Fuck this.
Dude… a sea container in the sun can reach 50C or more. And they do sit in some pretty hot places.. for a long time.
1. In intermodal transport, time is money. Good rates on shipping means an early packup. It can take at least three weeks to move a sea can from Central Europe to a disembarkation point on the US Coast. A week on the dock at the European end, a week in transit on a ship (including a day to load, a day to offload), a week sitting in bond on the NY, Boston, or GA docks, clear customs, then into a marshalling yard for road or rail move. 3-5 days getting to its final destination, if it’s a big box store. Orders can sit in a container at a manufacturer or distributor regional hub for weeks until it is separated into smaller shipments to individual stores.
Asia? Instead of a one week transit, it’s a minimum 12 days counting on load and offloading time. Then the same thing happens… customs, road, rail transit. So we’re talking one month, minimum, in a sea container. Assuming the ship is full and all cargo is bound for North America. If not, then a stop at a Central American port of call to pick up or drop off (4-5 more days). Pacific ports are hot. Singapore, Yokosuka, Guangzhou etc. are tropical in August-Sep. LA Long Beach is warm right thru to October, SEATAC less so.
These are
transit times. The reality is far worse due to bottle necks, shortages of sea containers, vessels waiting to “spot” for traffic (linger off ports until enough customers stack up to equal a full load.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/impor ... tes%20vary.
None of this is happening at the double. Some of it is automated but a lot is done by unionized dock workers, drivers, and government employees. The ship is moving at best economical speed, not full power.
You want fast? That’s the airline industry… but you can’t ship mass produced items like skis by air freight on the scale needed to meet US consumer demand. Simply not economically feasible.
So if your store is stocking its showroom in November, those skis left the factory at the end of August at the latest. Maybe as early as June in many cases.
2. Who do you think is ironing in wax at the factory? Elves? It’s another process. One that takes time and a great deal of care. Time and labor are money. We’re talking a mass produced item… thousands produced each day. There simply isn’t time. [Please don’t suggest something dumb, like simplifying the process to resemble spray tanning.]
3. Wax captures dirt. Some waxes resist dirt more than others
when skiing. It’s colder and harder then, with a water layer which helps disperse dirt. This is where floro waxes excel. Do a hot scrape of any ski you’ve used though. You’ll see the dirt coming out in the scraped wax. Black. That’s a ski that has been scraped and brushed before use. Now imagine one that has an untouched coat of wax on it for storage… sitting around for weeks in a storeroom. Or whaddya think, the store pays people to walk around dusting off skis? LOL.
The best, absolute best, that companies do is wrap their skis in polyethylene plastic (industrial cling wrap). That’s it. Waxing, nope. Not done.
Paying the retailer to prep skis comes at the end of all this. After you’ve bought the dry ski. Yes, they do wipe them down and wax them if you pay. If you did this step yourself, you’d discover two things: (1) the skis are unwaxed by the manufacturer and (2) they’re quite dirty. Takes several wipes with base cleaner and Fiberlene to get most of the dirt out. Another waxing and hot scrape to remove the last of it and the hairs off the skis before applying a second coat of base wax (if your lucky… most shops don’t bother with base prep wax). Then a top coat of glide wax… generic, all temperature shite if it’s done at the retail end. Otherwise you pay more for a “competition” prep, which is closer to what an experienced enthusiast does when “waxing for the day”.
Not to belabor the point, but have you even seen a ski that has a coat of storage wax on it? The bases look nothing like the skis you see in a store. They’re milky white with crumbled wax on the steel edges, wax drips on the sidewalls. Impossible to miss if you’ve ever seen them, which you haven’t because that’s not how they are shipped, stocked or sold.
As for qualifying your ignorance with an insult in advance of the inevitable dose of reality…. You’ve already proven one kind of ignorance. No need to double down with another.
Sorry to burst your bubble
@mca80.
