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Swix edge tuner12/3/2023 ![]() If I was tuning 12 (or more) pairs each night, most nights, I might feel differently. I haven't done a real comparison to the RT-as noted previously, I had a limited-time opportunity to get the Evo at a pricepoint that short-circuited further comparison-but I wouldn't write the Evo off as not being well-enough built for doing a few to a handful of pairs once or twice a week. The plastic casing doesn't bother me at all the tool still feels solid in my hand. I can't say the same about justifying three times that for a ProTek or similarly priced tool, for the same reason my garage is full of decent hand tools but not Snap-On or Mac quality-I'm not using them all day, every day, or even all day twice a week. ![]() I suspect any power edge tool would have similar benefits, although I do have to note that the ease of bevel swaps on the Evo is really nice when going between race skis at 3 degrees and all-mountain skis at 2 degrees (I could set them all to 3 degrees, I suppose, but that's a different discussion).įor my money, it's easy to justify the Evo pricepoint, even at MSRP, given the time savings. Getting the same results with hand tools would have easily taken 1.5 hours, maybe more given the condition of the touring skis, and the ease of keeping things up means that I expect I'll have sharp skis more often. I think the total time on edges was probably under 40 minutes. I took one pass with the coarse disc on the beat-up touring skis (after knocking down the damage with a ceramic stone), one pass on my girlfriend's all-mountain skis with a medium disc, and one pass on my slaloms with the fine disc. The other two had a few hard-snow days since the last tune. One pair (my touring skis) had not seen any edge work in.erhm.a while. I did a full tune (sharpen edges, quick bronze brush, and wax, not including final scraping) on three pairs of skis Monday night, in about an hour and a half, including pulling back sidewalls on one pair. My two cents, after living with the Evo for a bit, is that it's solidly built for the higher-end home-tuning market. I don't enjoy wearing a respirator while working, and I worry a bit about the possibility of transferring metal dust to other areas of the house via clothing (despite dedicating a hoodie to the tuning room), but if I can continue getting the results I've seen so far with the reduced time to get them, I'm happy with the value proposition. The ability to knock down rock damage with a ceramic stone and then take one or two passes with a coarse disc, plus one with a medium, to return an edge to being able to bite on conditions like I expect to find later this week make it worth it for me even factoring in the setup and break down time, I think it turns a 30-45 minute job into a 15-minute one, and that adds up quickly with multiple pairs of skis. The other options may be even better, but the results I've been getting so far have been good both on my race skis (which I'd be perfectly willing to tune by hand, given that I generally manage to keep them close to sharp to begin with) as well as all-mountain skis that get beat on a bit more. I had the opportunity to pick one up on a limited-time deal at a pricepoint I didn't think I'd be able to match with the RT, plus had the ability to get it into my hands quick, so I pulled the trigger. ![]() I picked one up this fall because my tolerance for time spent tuning vs amount of edge work to do changed with a move back east and moving in with my girlfriend (so I get to tune her skis, too).
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