Tip 1: If you have a day or so, spray water on your track to make a layer of ice. Tip 2: Spray cooking spray oil on the bottom of your sled to lubricate it. Snowboard or ski wax will last longer, but it is more expensive. Tip 3: Use sand paper to sad down the rough edges on your sled if there are any. Tip 4: Have as little of the sled touching the ground. If a lot of the sled is touching the ground, it will cause too much friction.
Tip 5: Pack down the snow on your track. All of the loose snow will slow your sled. This will also allow you to carry more people on the sled.
It should have had a low coefficient of friction, but the "No-stick" spray lived true to its name in all the wrong ways—by failing to stick to the bottom of my sled. It disappeared almost immediately, making my PAM time just as slow as my control run.
Paste wax is the lubricant of champions. Just ask Tom Cox, a former champion of the U. National Toboggan Championships , held annually in Camden, Maine. Cox is also its chief toboggan inspector, ensuring that the wooden sleds that race every year meet the competition's guidelines.
He's seen all sorts of substances slathered onto the bottom of sleds, from crosscountry wax to lemon Pledge. Cox may be stuck in a competitive rut, but he's a proven champion, and I trust his methods. That said, I quickly learned that paste wax is best smeared on wood, not plastic.
Using my hands, I spread the soft wax; it was lumpy and uneven, like dried-out peanut butter. I attracted quizzical glances from passersby who perhaps thought I was gobbing sandwich spread onto my sled.
Oh, and it left a chunky brown trail of goop down the hill. In conditions like these, flirting with snow's melting point, a softer wax like paste wax may be ideal. The coefficient for waxed wood on dry snow is remarkably low: 0. The closer the number is to zero, the slippier it is. For comparison, the coefficient for ice-against-ice is around 0. I can only imagine how low the number might be for a plastic kiddie sled. Another special ingredient that has also appeared on the bottom of sleds at the National Toboggan Championships?
Onion powder. Some sledders think that applying a fine powder is like adding tiny ball bearings to the bottom of a sled.
In truth, a mildly grainy bottom may help reduce capillary drag in warm conditions, stopping any clingy meltwater from hitching a ride. You can see this happen with superhydrophobic materials such as lotus leaves , which are composed of thousands of tiny microscopic pillars.
Those raised bumps decrease the points of contact between the leaf and a water droplet, ensuring that water will simply roll off. In fact, dozens of ski wax manufacturers are attempting to create waxes that mimic the nanostructure of lotus leaves. It's this principle that I hoped I could achieve with onion powder.
But when I couldn't find onion powder in my kitchen, I turned to Adobo seasoning, which might as well be the WD of seasoning. Chicken-fried steak. You can sprinkle this pixie dust on anything and it just works. Adobo might not contain onion powder, but if it can trick unwitting people into believing that I'm a talented cook, perhaps it could work similar magic on my sledding abilities. I wetted the bottom of my sled with a spritz of water and generously seasoned my plastic chariot.
It flopped. Whatever the reason, after three futile attempts down the hill, all the Adobo did was leave behind a glowing trail of yellow snow.
Before the Super Bowl, Philadelphia police prevented rabid Eagles fans from converting local streetlights into adult-sized monkey bars by scrubbing the city's utility poles with Bio-Bottle Jack Hydraulic Fluid , an environmentally friendly lubricant.
I was hungry to apply this legendary goo to my sled, but when I called local suppliers and asked to purchase it, all of them told me delivery would take weeks.
I suspected the city of Philadelphia had gobbled up the east coast's stockpile. Thankfully, I had a better alternative in my fridge: bacon fat. Anybody who has tried to wash their hands of rendered pig blubber knows that it hates water. Indeed, the grease spread onto my sled like melted butter. It was soft and waxy, and its smell mingled with all of the other scents on my hands—vanilla, canola oil, aerosol propellant, potential cockroach pheromone, paste wax, chicken seasoning—to create a miasma that is beyond my abilities to describe.
I may or may not have licked my fingers. I may or may not have regretted it. Around this time, a mother and a small child began walking toward the hill. I waved to them. There's nothing like the thrill of sledding down a hill. The thrill can be enhanced even further if you make a sled go faster. Techniques used to speed up a sled can range from simple to elaborate.
To be a real speed demon, you can try them all. Add more weight.
0コメント