After several years of skiing and skiing, you can find that the glue on your climbing skins is no longer holding up. Luckily, both refreshing and replacing the glue on your climbing skins is a very doable process and doesn’t take much other than a little bit of patience. Having patience beats dropping another $150 on a new pair of skins any day in our book.
Average Time from start to finish: 2-4 hours
Materials Needed
For Refreshing Glue
- Iron (preferably your waxing iron, not a clothes iron)
- Parchment paper
For Replacing Glue
- Iron (preferably your waxing iron, not a clothes iron)
- Masking tape
- Scissors
- Brown paper bags
- Black Diamond Gold Label Adhesive or G3 Glue Renew sheets
- Scraping tool
- Heat gun (optional – if using to remove glue rather than paper bags)
How to Refresh Climbing Skin Glue
- Lay your climbing skins out on a long table, or go in sections if you only have a shorter table
- Place sheets of parchment paper over the glue side of your climbing skins
- Turn your waxing iron to medium or med-high heat
- Run your iron along your skins, pressing lightly, until you see the glue show through the paper and smooth out
- Continue to move your iron around until you get rid of all the bubbles and air pockets
- Once totally smooth, leave the parchment paper on and let cool for at least 15 minutes
- When cool and dry, lightly peel the parchment paper off your climbing skins
Congrats, your glue should be refreshed and ready to go again!
How to Replace Climbing Skin Glue
1. Prep
- Lay your skins adhesive side up, along a table with newspaper underneath
- Some people actually attach their skins to their skis upside down to keep them in place
- Still putting newspaper between the ski and skin so that glue doesn’t make its way onto the ski base
2. Remove Glue / Clean Skins (2 methods)
- Method 1
- cut brown paper bags in pieces that fit the width of your skis.
- Place brown paper bag strips over adhesive side of climbing skins
- Iron over the paper bag strips, heating up the glue (similar to the steps on refreshing glue)
- Rather than letting the glue sit and cool, when the glue is hot and has soaked onto the paper strips, peel the paper strips off taking the glue with it
- Repeat several times with several paper bag strips to remove more and more glue
- Finish up by scraping an excess glue off skins with scraper to extent possible
- Method 2
- Use a Heat gun (no parchment paper or brown bags) to heat up the glue in small sections
- While the glue is hot and “gooey”, use a scraper to scrape it off
- Move in 6-8 inch sections down the length of your skins until all glue has been removed
3. Apply new glue
- Put masking tape on the grip/fuzzy side of your climbing skins so that the new glue doesn’t spill over to that side
- Apply new glue using product instructions (most popular options are either Black Diamond Gold Label Adhesive or the G3 Glue Renew sheets…..the sheets are easier and more straightforward but are a little more expensive)
- For G3 Glue Renew — make sure there are no air pockets when you press the sheets down onto your skins. Cut the sheets to the shape of your skins, removing any excess. Iron over them just like in previous steps. Wait 15-20 minutes to let cool and dry, then remove carefully remove the paper.
- For BD Adhesive — apply light amounts of adhesive at a time, trying your best to evenly spread out with a scraper (some people say using an old credit card/hotel key also works well). Keep adding and spreading adhesive evenly until the whole climbing skin has a nice even coat of adhesive. Then place parchment paper over the adhesive and iron/smooth out just like in other steps to get a smooth, uniform coat.
4. Use skin savers
- Especially the first handful of times out, as the new glue will be extra sticky
If you have any other questions, better ways, ideas, let us know in the comments section below!
Here is another useful video from the Alpine Institute: