You arrive at your favorite snowboarding resort after a few hours of driving. It's late, but it's been snowing for a few days. Tomorrow morning the forecast calls for clear skies and mild temperatures.

Problem is, you forgot to wax your snowboard! The base is dry and it has a few scratches that you got from early season riding. What to do? All the shops are closed

Well, hopefully you have a tuning kit, or at least snowboard wax. Everything else you need to hot wax your board you can use household items. This article assumes you have a tuning kit, with snowboard wax, edge sharpener, scraper, and scotch brite pad.

First, grab a couple of chairs and set your board on it, base up. You don't have to remove the bindings, you can just position the board so the bindings hang between the chairs.

Plug in the ironyou can use a regular iron with holes if that's all you got (they're cheaper than wax irons) but once you dedicate an iron to waxing your board, don't use it to iron your clothes! Press a stick of snowboard wax to the iron surfaceif it starts smoking turn down the heat. You just want to melt the wax, not burn it.

Hold the iron at an angle so that the wax drips from one of the corners. Drip it along the edges, and along the radius bend at the ends. No need to wax the ends of the board because it doesn't touch the snow when you ride. Unless you're doing some fancy tricks

Then drip an S-pattern along the middle of the base. Allow it to cool for a few minutes.

Then iron the wax into the board. Make sure to iron it all the way to the edges. Allow it to cool again.

Hold the scraper at a 45 degree angle to scrape off as much wax as you can. Preferably scrape in the direction you ride. After you can't scrape any more wax, get the scotch brite pad and buff the base. You'll be left with a thin layer of wax that fills in all the tiny grooves and the early-season scratches.

Finally, sharpen the edges with the sharpener. 2 or 3 swipes along the edge is all you need. Make sure there is no wax on the rails.

Get some sleep and grab first chair tomorrow!

Learn more about this author, Danny Leung.
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