Revive Your Climbing Skins: Glue Ironing

January 10, 2024

Climbing skins are some of the most fickle pieces in a ski touring kit. More specifically the glue. It often ends up leaving sticky globs on bases as the skin’s age, or failing and losing it’s tackiness when you need it most.

Doing a full re-glue is a messy and involved process, but a quick iron of your skin glue can breath new life into them and help them keep kicking for another season.

Before/After glue ironing

Just takes a few steps:

1. Apply parchment paper to glue side of skins (not wax paper!)
2. Iron on moderate temp until glue looks to be evenly adhering to the parchment paper (see below).
3. Wait for the glue to feel cool to the touch
4. Slowly remove paper
5. Go ski!

Additional tips:

• I find that placing the skins upside down on the skis and held in place with voile straps makes a good makeshift surface to iron on.
• For really nasty skins it can work best to forgo the parchment paper and spread out the glue like butter with a hot iron. Cleaning up the iron after doing this is a bit involved though.

Parchment paper before/after ironing