The week at Soldier Hollow was a great opportunity for us to do some intensive testing. You can’t possibly learn so much, so fast, when you’re not in a competition setting. We won’t make any outlandish claims about having the best wax or service, but we were very satisfied with our results over the week. Here are some brief notes on what we used, and how it worked:
Kick Wax
Vauhti K-base binder was great for us for the distance classic races. This was interesting, because previous to this past week I would have confidently stated that I could beat K-base binder with a combination of K-base klister and the Super base. K-base binder is not unrelated to that mix, but it has a klister with more kicking ingredient. Often it’s slower, but this week it was giving us great speed and superior kick.
K18 worked as advertised in the manmade and old snow early in the week. Great speed in the cold, and secure kick as the day warmed. One curious thing we found was that the K18 was prone to getting slow when the snow started to act a bit wet and mealy. That may be related to the thickness of the wax job – we tend to use K18 and binder with a bit of cushion built-in to the application. As tracks start to get wetter it’s a good bet that a thinner wax application will be much faster.
K15 is excellent in new, sharp crystals. When we’re home in the East we usually think of K15 as having pretty uncertain kick. But in falling, high-humidity mountain snow like we saw on Thursday, the K15 was quite good.
Paraffin
The Vauhti World Cup guys told me to try an HF Blue/Yellow mix, and we had good luck with that all week. The softer paraffins didn’t run well for us. HF Violet has given us some really good days this season, but it was flatly bad in Utah. At the end of the week in fresh snow and warm temps the HF Pink jumped right over the Violet, but the Blue/Yellow was still better.
Powders
The future is bright for Vauhti fluoro powders. The new C139 powder (soon to be released as hfC9.1) has been outstanding for us. We were surprised this week that it continued to be our best powder in the fresh new snow at temps colder than its advertised range. This is a new product for us this season, and it’s been excellent in snow, rain, new, old, hot, moderate, manmade, etc. Good stuff.
C11 powder is reliably good in older or manmade snow with cold(ish) temps. It’s not the stuff for new snow, but we end up relying on it frequently in older snow.
330C is the colder ingredient in the hfC15 powder, and that was quite good in the coldest temps of the week. We don’t want to make the whole line too complicated, but we have to keep working with these CODE powders to understand the line well!
Top Coats
hfC15 Liquid. It was part of our race solution in every event this week. We had a number of coaches tell us that it runs well in almost all conditions. This looks more and more like a go-to solution for people who want to keep the whole thing simple and have very competitive skis. We’re still nervous about the whole liquid thing with long distance racing. I don’t quite have the confidence to tell people to go with straight hfC15 liquid for the Birkie. But the stuff appears to be both extremely flexible, and extremely fast. If I had to pick one, and only one, fluoro top-coat to use in all conditions, this would absolutely be it!
Hand Structure
Hand structure didn’t start out the week as a really big deal, but by the end of the week it was critical.Red Creek makes lots of structure tools. Among the most popular are the 0/-10 and the 0/-6. The 0/-6 is newer, and the buzz from Sweden has been that it’s good in new snow. Well, we liked the 0/-10 all week, until it snowed a bit. And then 0/-6 was the ticket. Reassuring!
On the classic sprint day the Red Creek stuff did not feel good, and we had excellent luck with the Finite CP17 rollers. One roller for qualifying, and both for the heats.
Woodskis Foot Pedal
Peter Breu has put together a great waxing table system – taking the best ideas from the various options on the market, and manufacturing at home. These tables would cost over $2K if they were imported from Europe, but because he sells them direct the price is reasonable. We asked him to copy the foot-pedal-actuated pneumatic vice in our workshop with a spring-load pedal-actuated vice. The result is awesome. Hands-free clamping is where it’s at. Mundahl was bummed – the foot pedal was on my side of the table.
Erik Mundahl
Erik joined us this week to help with testing and waxing. We’ve collaborated with Erik quite a lot for a long time on testing, but this is the first time we’ve worked a race series together. Race service is hard work, and Erik is no stranger to it, so he knew what he was signing up for. He was our primary test pilot this week, and he spent over 30 hours on skis. Work days were running in the 10-13 hour range, and when up to 5 of those hours are moving on skis it gets to be pretty tough. Some people can show up and try hard, but end up being a liability to the whole system. Mundahl was a seamless addition, and added a ton of value. I would take him to any event to be part of a service team.
Family Ski Service
Working with Amy and Gunnar is really fun. For the past ten years doing ski service has meant being away from the family, or else having two parents effectively doing the work of one. This week we had three Caldwells pitching in. Gunnar skipped a week of school to work at Nationals, and it made the whole thing so much more fun for all of us than it would have been otherwise. Amy and I were both full-time waxers, and we (Amy) kept up with shipping web-orders and billing. And Gunnar turns out to be a good test pilot – even on 192cm test skis!