Core Shots Galore

During today's powder day I did the worst damage to my Sugar Daddy's that I had ever done. I skied over a patch of rocks that were covered by a few inches of new snow and in that one moment I got three core shots and broke a piece of my binding. A core shot is when the plastic coating (p-tex)on the base of a ski is completely scraped off exposing the core of the ski. In this case my skis have a fiberglass core, but some skis have wood cores. You really have to hit something hard to damage your skis this badly. In the two months that I have been here I have probably run over hundreds of rocks, logs, stumps and dirt patches and I previously have had only one core shot. If left unrepaired coreshots can ruin skis by allowing water to get into the core causing swelling and delamination. The coreshot in the photo is pretty big. The other two in my other ski were smaller. At the left is a smaller coreshot that I got a few weeks ago, which was professionally repaired. You repair this sort of damage by dripping molten p-tex into the hole until it is level with the original base. It is actually a pretty easy repair, but the bases of the skis don't look as good as they used to. For the broken binding part I went to a bunch of ski shops in town to see if anyone had one. After about six shops I finally found a part which fit although the colors didn't match, but I don't really care. These skis now have a lot of character. Hopefully they will still ski the same.