After several years of ski touring, my skins started to shows signs of aging. Scouring the internet, many people have said G3 skin glue is bad, terrible, awful, or whatever other synonym for woeful. I would say my experience overall was not amazing, but does not warrant such harsh criticism.
This isn't a review of the skin performance, so I'll skip through the majority of that and talk more about the process for removing the glue from the skins and applying new glue. This is my first attempt at glue renew, but before trying glue renew, you might want to try a glue refresh first.
Tools you will need:
- heat gun
- paint scraper or wide scraper of some sort
- work bench
- flat surface that can skin can be clamped to
- clamps.
1. Signs skins may need a glue refresh:
- there are pockets all along the glue like the picture above
- the glue is tacky to the feel and leaves a thin film on your hand
- the glue leaves residue on your skis
To glue refresh, cover your skins glue side with parchment paper. Place the skin plush side down on a long, flat workbench. Take a hot iron at 100-120C (or per mfg specs) and pressing lightly on the parchment paper, try to flatten out all the glue pockets. The glue should not be smelling and there should not be any smoke while doing this. If you get smoke or smell, back off the heat. After going through the entire length of the skin, let the glue cool down for about 10mins or so and peel away the parchment paper to see if the glue did indeed improve. This step should take about 15mins or so. You can do a few passes and cooldowns, but I found that one good pass will do the majority of the refreshing.
Removing residue from your skis:
If you have skin glue residue on your skis there are several options you can try out. Base cleaner, which is a citrus degreaser apparently works for some people, but for me and the G3 skins I have, I have found that mineral oil (baby oil) works really well binding to the monomer and linking up the molecule (from my experimentation). It looks like from reading some MSDS, that one of the main ingredients in BD skin glue is Ethyl cyanoacrylate. Solvents for that monomer are acetone, methyl ethel keytone, methlene chloride, etc. So citrus degreaser would just move the glue around your skis.
I tried mineral oil, citrus degreaser, bike chain solvent, detergent, soap all at room temp or colder, and the mineral oil with some elbow grease works best.
2. After glue renew, if any of the problems above persists, consider either glue renew OR new skins. This step take a lot of time so here is some information regarding when you should even consider glue renew.
- mohair, vs nylon skins. Nylon skins according to G3 last indefinitely as long as you take care of the skins. If they are still gripping the snow, then renewing them is a good option to save of costs and environmental impact. Mohair skins only have a finite life so if your skins are made out of mohair and have a few seasons in them already, it's may not be worth the effort to glue renew.
3. Removing old glue. First remove the rip strip in the middle of the skin.
4. Fix the tip, tail with clamps to the work bench. Do not use an iron and paper to remove glue, use a heat gun and a scraper. heat glue and wait for the glue to get nice and waterlike in consistency and scrape forward. Put the bad glue residue on a piece of cardboard to throw away. Repeat until all the glue is off the skin. It should not be sticky to the touch. It probably takes about 1 hour to do both skins here.
- it's likely if you are glue renewing, you'll probably want to wash your skins and reapply a waterproof coating on the plush. I don't bother buying the name brand skin waterproofing since it's all silicone based waterproofing so I used furniture waterproofing spray from crappy tire. I would reapply the waterproofing after the glue has been removed from the skin and the skins washed. Wash skins in cold water with soap.
5. Once all the glue is removed from the skins and you have applied the waterproof coating etc, transfer on the glue sheet by pushing down with some force, minimize air bubbles by starting from tip and slowing bonding the two pieces together incrementally to the tail. Follow the mfg guidelines on which side to xfer.
6. Flip over so plush side facing up. Clamp tip tail. Trim the excess glue. You can tape up the plush with painters tape to to help prevent the glue from sticking onto the edges. I found it wasn't really necessary if you are careful with trimming. You'll have to cut out the glue around the plastic bits of the tip/tail as well.
7. Flip plush side down. Clamp tail. Set your iron to temp specified by mfg and iron the sheet. Start from tail of skin. Press firmly, but not too much that it squeezes the glue over the edge. I find pushing harder around the tip tail connector help with releasing the glue from the sheet at the end. Let cool for 10 mins or so. Release the sheet from the tail side first. Go slow to see if any of the glue is not sticking properly. Go over it again with a hot iron and let it cool each time you go over a spot again with an iron (you roll over the spot with iron and parchment paper). Peel the backing such that it's parallel to the skin.
If there are any spots that peel away, you'll need to go over it again with the leftover bits of glue from trimming and parchment paper.
The speckles in the picture above is rain. It took me so long to do the glue renew that the weather started going sour on me. The adhesion worked OK for my first attempt. A few holes.
Time needed:
total time roughly 2-4 hours for first time making sure your setup is done properly. With cleaning it adds another hour or so for drying. Probably can be done in 1 hour if this isn't your first rodeo...
*note, after reading a bunch of reviews on BD gold label glue, I'll probably try that out next time if I ever decide to reglue these skins...
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