We’re just coming off a fun and successful weekend of race service at the UVM Carnival / Eastern Cup / Super Tour races in Craftsbury. The races were originally scheduled for Stowe, but moved to Craftsbury where the combination of snowmaking and infrastructure investment once again proves to be the only thing left in the world that you can depend on. I mean, aside from Vauhti hfC9.1 (now called Wet) in warm conditions.
This year we’ve been teaming up with Pat O’Brien and the SMS T2 team for a lot of our race service trips, including US Nationals, and the past two Super Tour weekends in the east. The reason is simple – Pat is an old friend – really more a member of the family than a friend. We’ve worked together a lot, for a lot of years, and it just works really well. We’ve also been able to pull Brayton Osgood into the mix – Brayton does winter service work with the SMS juniors. Both Pat and Brayton grew up in Putney, and I coached both of those guys as juniors. Pat, Brayton, Austin, Amy and I make a hell of a team. When we can afford to add Erik Mundahl (like at US Nationals) or rope-in Dylan McGuffin (like we did this past weekend), it just adds to the mix.
To be really clear, one of the reasons it works for us to cooperate with SMS T2 is that Pat doesn’t get hung-up on secrets. We share our information with everybody, and we provide the winning products to anybody who wants to buy them. Pat is happy to depend on hard work to put his skiers in the race – he doesn’t ask us for any exclusive treatment.
Why so many people? Well, we’re doing a ton of testing. We have four matched fleets of test skis, and our protocol has been to start with two fleets set-up for paraffin testing, one for powder, and one for hand structure. After the initial paraffin testing we move one of those fleets to testing top-coats. With a whole bunch of test skis and a whole bunch of test pilots we’ve been able to test a whole bunch of products, and we’ve accumulated a whole bunch of information.
One of the reasons we’re so intent on gathering a ton of information is that we’re trying to figure out where to invest our energy for the future of our wax and tools business. Since we returned to Vermont in 2011 we’ve been importing Vauhti wax directly from Finland, but this year the new owner at Vauhti decided that he wanted to pursue a much broader distribution in the US, including the alpine market. We still have a very good relationship with Vauhti, but our cost has gone up and our margins have gone down, so Vauhti alone cannot pay for the investment in travel, testing and promoting wax sales. In response we’ve broadened the scope of our testing dramatically. We’ll see what it all boils down to in time, but for now we’re intent on finding out what works, when it works, where it works, and how it works.
With all of that said, it’s time to pass along some of our most interesting test results!
Paraffin
There is a common perception that paraffin doesn’t matter too much, since it’s just going to get covered up with fluoro top coats. There are certainly times when that is true, but overall we find that paraffins are very important. Paraffin waxes go into solution in the base material and modify the bulk properties of the base. To use one of my favorite cooking analogies; fluoro top coats are like the seasoning on your steak, but paraffin is like the cut of meat.
Underlayers
The preparation of the base under the final race paraffin can make a huge difference. Functionally, the race paraffin will interact with whatever is in the base previously. The amount of mixing that goes on will depend on the different melt points of the waxes involved, and their basic affinity for each other. A lot of people automatically put on a graphite or molybdenum underlayer, or else automatically put on a harder underlayer. Our testing indicates that this is often just a bad idea. Our underlayer testing has been won by three products in the past year.
Vauhti LF Base – This orange-colored base paraffin is a very neutral wax that seems to accommodate almost any race paraffin layer on top, without changing its bulk properties. In many conditions we find that this neutral underlayer is much better than harder underlayers. I feel that a harder underlayer can often “block” the winning paraffin – preventing full saturation, and pushing it outside of its optimal operating range in terms of bulk properties. If I had to select one race underlayer without testing, LF base would be the one. We’ve been using it for all of our zeroing-out of race skis, and any pre-race-weekend preparation of test or race skis.
Rex LF Graphite – We always test graphite underlayers because many people always use them. More often than not we find that graphite underlayers are significantly slower than a “clean” base. I think that a lot of folks assume that the graphite provides better durability. I haven’t been able to document that phenomenon, and while I’m confident that it’s true on occasion, I usually don’t have time to test it extensively, and I’m unwilling to take a big hit on performance up front in exchange for the hope of faster skis at some undefined later point. Durability testing is something that we do, but once you get up beyond 10km in your durability test it really takes some resources. I haven’t run a test where I find that graphite underlayers which are slower to begin become an advantage within 10km.
However, when graphites are working we find an immediate speed benefit. Under these circumstances we find that Rex LF graphite (formerly RCF Graphite) has been our best. I’m sure that others have their days, and I’d much prefer to work with almost any other wax (that stuff is not fun to apply). But in dirty and manmade snow (like we’ve seen in the past two weekends of super tour racing) we’ve been using the Rex LF.
Vauhti 10F Hardener – Generally speaking hardeners are designed to be used on top of race paraffins, either as a final layer, or as a modifier prior to fluoro layers. Hardeners are long-chain synthetic paraffins which general have a relatively moderate melt-point, but cool very quickly and have a very hard finish. They don’t tend to penetrate the base deeply, and instead form a “shell” layer near the surface. When they’re used as an underlayer they behave quite differently from a harder paraffin layer – rather than “blocking” the race paraffin, my sense is that the race paraffin melts-through the hardener (which has a lower melt point than similarly hard paraffin). I’m not a chemist, but my sense is that the addition of long-chain synthetic paraffins might speed up the crystallization of the race paraffin in the base. Whatever the case, the addition of 10F as an underlayer is something that Amy started doing in West Yellowstone the year before last, and it’s become one of our most consistent winners. This past weekend our testing showed that Rex LF Graphite had better high end run-out speed (using paired glide-outs for our paraffin testing), while the 10F made great low-speed release. So we used both, with the idea that they’re doing two different things, and aren’t really in competition with each other.
Very Ultra Super High Fluoro Paraffin – For years the standard in race paraffins has been “high fluoro”. It’s worth noting that this designation is totally non-specific and mostly useless, since there are no standards in place regarding percentages. I don’t even know how companies differentiate between levels of fluorination of the hydrocarbon chain (replacing hydrogen atoms with fluorine atoms) and perfluoro additive in an admixture. The chemistry is pretty opaque to me.
Some companies have offered extra-high fluoro products for quite a few years, and I’ve never found them to be particularly compelling. Mostly, I haven’t seen the advantage show through the addition of pure fluoro layers very often. We’re mostly interested in the paraffin that provides the fastest skis as part of a full build-up of powders and top-coats. That’s not always the same as the paraffin that wins the paraffin test. Some paraffins have great lubricating properties, but not optimal bulk properties, and my assumption in the past has been that the addition of more fluoro content than the standard “HF” stuff was somehow compromising the bulk properties of the wax.
Recently there have been new extra-fluorinated products showing up on the market, and my feeling is that these are different from what we’ve seen in the past. This year we’ve been working with three new lines of paraffin products. The Vauhti Ultra Fluoro line (we actually started testing that last spring when I brought home test samples of prototypes from Falun), Red Creek Super Glider, and a new line of Star “VF” waxes using a new “cera-flon” nano-ceramic technology. All of these waxes have had their moments, and helped to provide us some great race skis.
Vauhti Ultra Fluor – Last spring Amy and I started testing this stuff, and we assumed it would just become the new standard because it was significantly better than the old HF in every test we made. However, at the start of this season it appeared that it wouldn’t simply replace the HF. In early races we liked the HF better. But by the time US Nationals rolled around, the UF waxes were back in front, and making a significant difference to our test results. In the blue range it’s been a bit of a toss-up between HF Blue (called Cold in the new packaging) and UF Cold. But the warmer conditions have been solidly dominated by UF. While we’ve had some days where the HF and UF Pink (Mid) have been equal, the UF has most often been clearly better. The same is true of the Yellow (Wet). Most significantly these waxes have shown the ability to carry an advantage through pure fuoro layers.
Red Creek Super Glider – We’ve shown some photos of this stuff on facebook, but for most of you this is news. Red Creek wax? Yup. Those guys have been playing with wax for a bunch of years, and these paraffins have been on world cup skis (particularly in biathlon) for a couple of years. This stuff has been really interesting in testing. It absolutely crushed our testing last weekend in Craftsbury, and I think it provided a very real advantage. Previously we’ve had it running well consistently, but not winning the tests. Interestingly, it’s been consistently close, regardless of whether it was other ultra-high fluoro or more normal HF products winning. We’ve got five of these waxes, and we’ve still got a lot of learn about them. But my sense is that we’ll be working with them more as time passes.
One other interesting note on these – based on a tip from Andreas we’ve been testing them some against our pure fluoro top-coats with alarming success. They go really well with a hand-corked or roto-corked application. These waxes have a different texture and quality than most paraffins, and I don’t think we’d see the same results hand-corking other HF paraffins, but we might give it a shot!
Star VF – We’ve been doing some prototype testing this season for Davide Mosele – the Star chemist. We’ve got three different versions of some new VF waxes, and have had really outstanding and consistent luck with one of them. The same version has showed up in other testing in Europe, and will be presented as a new VF line in next year’s catalog. The Star stuff wasn’t great in Houghton during Nationals, where Vauhti pretty well dominated. But if I needed to pick a line for our eastern conditions this season it might have to be Star. These waxes also provide an advantage under fluoro layers, and will remain in our line-up for the future.
Pure Fluoro Products
Vauhti LDR has been a really successful fluoro product for us. It does very well as a powder, but last year we found an alarmingly wide range of winning performances when we used it as a hand-corked top layer. This year they produced it in a compressed fluoroblock form as a result, and we’ve continued to find good success with that product. At US Nationals we got the first delivery of the new LDR liquid, and that shot straight to the top of the test results immediately. That LDR liquid has quickly taken over a big part of the range that we’ve previously depended on the 15.1 liquid to cover. In general the 15.1 remains the best in high moisture new snow and mild cold conditions. In colder conditions, older snow, and more saturated wet conditions the LDR has done better. That means that it pretty-well “surrounds” a fairly specialized 15.1 range, which is remarkable when I consider how widely we were using the 15.1 liquid in the past several seasons!
Application Notes
We’ve tested some different application methods this season, and have had a lot of success using a “slurry” of powder and liquid, and a roto-fleece felt roller to apply the mix. The roto-fleece felt roller is really interesting because it does a lot of very effective mechanical work on the fluoro compound, but puts very little heat into the base itself. This is quite different from a roto-cork, which generates quite a lot of heat in the base. You might well wonder why that would matter? Well, here’s what I think. Our race paraffin goes into solution in the base and modifies the bulk properties of the base in agreeable ways. It takes time for the paraffin to cool and crystallize in the base. Often we see big differences between skis that were waxed with paraffin the night before a race and skis waxed the morning of the race. These differences usually occur in mild conditions with a fair amount of moisture present, and often coincide with big differences in the paraffin testing – where some products appear to offer a significant advantage. Under these circumstances it’s nice to avoid “cooking out” the paraffin with a 180 degree iron during the application of fluoro powder. I also feel that the cold application maintains a higher level of plasticity and hydrophobicity in the fluoro coating.
The big question is durability. Everybody accepts that the ironed powder application provides tremendous durability. This past weekend we had heavily transformed manmade snow with a lot of dirt in the mix, and we were concerned about durability, even for a relatively short race. So on Saturday morning we had Amy run a durability test where she skis 10 KM on Vauhti hfC9.1 powder versus 9.1 powder/liquid “slurry” applied with a felt roller. The slurry was clearly faster the whole time – even after ten kilometers, and independent blind testers confirmed the significance of the feel test. That test gave us the confidence to use that slurry application for the Super Tour race, which also allowed the great performance of our Red Creek silver paraffin to shine through. The result was five of six podium positions on the day. We stayed with the same set-up with relatively little retesting for Sunday’s classic race. The exception is that we found that a slurry of Star XFW and F30 powder was perhaps a little better than the Vauhti 9.1 mix that we had been using, and we put that on the skate skis that Kris used to double-pole to his “classic” win. We haven’t done a lot of mixing and matching of different liquids and powders with this slurry application. But we’ll keep screwing around and will be sure to announce any great successes. We’ll also continue to pursue the durability testing.
Hand Structure
With additional testing resources on the ground this season we’ve made a bigger and more consistent push on our hand-stucture testing. We’ve got some interesting prototype structures from Red Creek which have shown promise, but the picture that’s emerged is one of very high reliability from the 0/-6, +5/-5 Skrå, and Coarse structures. These three, along with the -5/-20 cold structure, share a similar pattern architecture, with an interrupted thread or “screw” pattern. In general the 0/-6 is at its best in newer snow and moderate cold conditions (call it “blue” range), but with some glaze. The +5/-5 is reliably excellent in “zero” conditions – right between hard wax and klister, and sometimes considerably wetter, when the moisture is coming up and causing a “tight” track surface. The Coarse is surprisingly low on liability in a really broad range, and are quite excellent as the snow gets coarse and wet. All of these structures are characterized by really easy “release”, and have good “feeling” qualities in skating. We also see good run-out speed from these structures, but often get better high end with the addition of the linear 1mm or 2mm rollers, or with the Finite CP-17 rollers (unbroken “screw” patterns). I find that we often fail to accurately predict whether the straight linears or the CP-17s will be best, but usually we end up with one or the other in combination with the broken structures.
In colder conditions we continue to see reliably excellent performance from a single Finite CP-17 roller. The Red Creek -5/-20 has its moments, but without solid testing it can also present a liability, and my confidence is higher in the CP-17.
We’ve sold a ton of Red Creek 0/-10 structures over the past several years, and have regularly had this one winning tests. But this season it hasn’t been showing up for us as well as the trio of tools that I’ve cited above. I’m sure it’s days will return!