How to Wax a Board Tropical Edition

As with the How to De-Wax Your Board video, this may seem obvious for the experienced surfer. My dad taught me how to do it, so if you don’t have dad or a mentor who has been surfing their whole life, you might find yourself surfing the web for answers.
Believe it or not, wax and how to wax your board can be a polarizing issue in surfing. When I was taught to do it my dad used paraffin or candle wax to make the base coat “beads.” He swore by this method. As I grew older the wax companies got better and better at making different consistencies of wax (higher and lower melting temps) for different water temps. This made the paraffin unnecessary. Following the theory of the paraffin, however, the idea is that you want to use a very hard coat of wax as the bottom layer. This is regardless of water temp.
We call this first layer the “base coat.” You can use a wax specifically named “base coat” (made by most brands) or you can use tropical wax, which is the hardest kind of wax after base coat. In this vid I use tropical wax for the base and the top layer. It’s hard enough to serve as both. It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to use base then tropical, but that’s not what I did here, and it served me just fine for a month in warm water.
The main keys to a tropical wax job/first coat of wax:
00:26 make sure the board is laying on something soft so you don’t scratch the bottom (or rest it on your thighs in a standing position)
1:19 just get wax on there - you need a film to form - use the edge of the bar and press hard enough so the film forms but not too hard, which makes it difficult to do the movements
1:29 “cross hatching” that you see in other YT vids is not a “thing” for long time surfers - almost none of us do it that way
2:05 after the film has formed it’s all about BIG CIRCLES to make the bead
2:17 speed and appropriate pressure are the key (pay attention to the sound as you watch this part - that’s how it ought to sound every time you wax your board)
2:37 I describe why the circular motion is important to form “the bead”
2:56 how much of the board you ought to wax
3:13 make sure you get the rails
3:37 wax it again before every surf in the tropics (yes even if you surf multiple times in one day)
Thanks for watching! Stay tuned for my wax preferences and how to wax for cold water videos in the future.
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More waves more joy!

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