Look Henry I Got Glue Stuck on My Skis

After a grueling climb and ski of Little Bear I had a decent amount of pine needle and sap on my skis, so I took some white gas and cleaned up the bases nicely and put the skis into storage for the summer.   Fast forward to next year and my brother Mike and I are on an early season tour up to Berthoud Pass, at the top of Lift Ggully I go to pull my skins off and there is a whole lot of skin glue stuck on my skis.  Skiing down with that much glue on the skis felt like skiing with your skins on, if your skins were on backwards.  After that run we were done for the day and I was left with my skis in shape best described as no good.  

I did a little research on how to remove skin glue from ski bases, one post on TGR had a few ideas, one was to heat the glue up and scrape it off, another was to use white gas and just clean it off.  Starting with the heating and scraping idea, I was unable to make much progress at all, so I switched over to the white gas approach.  There was a lot of glue on the bases, but eventually by using a bunch of steel wool and white gas, I was able to get it all off.  It took several passes to get rid of the glue, then I switched to a t-shirt rag to do the finishing touches.

The before

and the after

Will it work?  I'm hoping to take the skis and skins out for a little tour up in Breckenridge to find out. I definitely don't want to get on anything too committing or lengthy without knowing for sure the glue stuck to the skin debacle won't happen again.