Ski waxing mess

Ski wax is awful stuff when you find it on the floor around the waxing bench.  It makes the floor dangerously slippery and can also make your shoes slippery if you step on it.  Because wax is strange stuff, it isn't easy to keep things neat and tidy.  Anyone who has scraped excess hot wax from a ski knows that fine wax shavings become electrostatically charged and will cling to your sweater or pants.  In my experience, putting newspaper on the floor under the waxing bench to collect the messy wax will collect maybe half of the wax waste.

I had all this negative experience in mind when I recently made a dedicated fixture to hold Nordic skis while we wax them.  I thought I would try putting a wax collecting tarp as close to the ski as possible.  I sewed two sleeves in a narrow scrap of tarp material and then slid a couple of 1x2s slightly longer than our skis to hold the tarp in place.  This seems to work great and nearly all the scraped wax ends up in the tarp, where I can use the shop-vac to get rid of the mess.

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