A descriptive, non frustrating, mostly accurate, and fairly quick guide on, how to clean and re-glue your very effed up split board skins.

Sometimes I find "How to..." anything to be incredibly frustrating. It seems there is not nearly enough information, not enough pictures/media or way to much about an entirely different subject. With this "how to" I hope that it is straight to the point, how I wish "how to" tutorials were when I need them.  So here we go, "How to fix your skins when they are incredibly f***** up.

Let me define "incredibly f***** up". When I went to pull them apart for the first tour of the year it was very difficult and as I pulled each end, little stringy fibers (that seemed to be a foot long) stayed attached to either side. That can't be good, I said. And the logical person I am continued to put them on my split board. One can imagine the difficult time I had when I went to transition... glue was stuck everywhere, and I mean everywhere. It was all over the bottom of the board, my bindings, gloves, pants... you get the idea.

Flash forward a few weeks of endless frustration and internet searches. At last I found some direction. To summarize, I needed to get all the gross, hairy glue off off my skins and then re-glue them.

Necessary materials

• Iron
• Paper bags and/or sketch pad paper 
• Skin glue, I used black diamond gold label adhesive
• Old rec. pass (credit card and other plastic cards will do) to spread new glue 
• Rubber bands or other creative ways to hold the skin onto the ski while you iron

SO here we go, step by gooey gross step.

1. Crack open a Montucky... whew I feel much better and ready to tackle this project 
2. Find the least janky spot that you can lay out your ski/splitboard upside down with the skin laying on top of them with the glue side up.
3. Find something to attach the skin to the ski with so that it doesn't slide around. I don't have a fancy work bench, I don't have clamps, so I tried out rubber bands and it did the job.
4. Locate an absurd amount of paper bags, orrrrrr sketch pad paper will to the trick. 
5. Cut paper bags/paper into long strips, make sure they are at least as wide as the skin. Lay out the strips to cover the length of the skin. 
6. Begin to iron the paper bags, I set my iron heat between 4-5 (that would be medium to high). Do not leave the iron on one section for more that 10 seconds, keep it moving! 
7. Once you have worked your way all the way down the skin, begin to peel off the strips.
8. Repeat steps 6 & 7 until there is practically no glue left. If you have a bunch of dog hair and crumbs on your skins as I did, this will remove all of that. Once it is no longer sticky icky to the touch you are ready to move on. 
9. Crack another montucky, your doing great! 
10. Posssibly re-locate your work bench if yours was as janky as mine was. I moved to my counter top, make sure if you also do this, to put down some card board. Montucky 12 pack boxes work great. 
11. Lay the skin down with the "new to be glued" side face up. Clamp down each end of the skin, yet again I chose the most fancy of ways...duct tape, tye dye to be exact.
12. Nowwww we are ready to re-glue. (See in video). Work in small sections. Squeeze a good amount of glue onto the skin and the spread with your chosen plastic card. 
13. Make your way around the entire skin, work somewhat quickly as the glue does begin to get tacky. 
14. Repeat for the other skin.
15. Hang to dry in the bathroom, or a more convenient space. Make sure to open windows, the glue is strong and a bit stinky
16. Crack a monutcky because you just fixed your skins all by your badass self.









One of the many yucky pieces of paper I pulled off my skins












17. Once the skins are dry, test them for stickiness, repeat gluing step if they need more.

Clean up: Clean up your mess, if you were super messy and didn't put cardboard down and there is glue everywhere first try to clean it with soap and water. If that doesn't work you need something stronger like rubbing alcohol or if you have it, toluene. 

And my favorite, pictures and media so you know what the heck I am talking about.

Least janky spot as mentioned in step 2

This video shows the skins after a few rounds of ironing paper, still gross. Then a short clip of the skins with paper, just for a visual, and the skins nice and fresh and ready to be re-glued. Finally it shows a very professional time lapse and the finished product. Enjoy!