Cleaning Contour Hybrid Skins — Sauce Application is Key

Setting up for cleaning one of our pairs of Contour Hybrid ski touring climbing skins (in this case a set of splits used on our wider test skis). These guys are purported to be the elite of carpets; the Audi Quatrro of the skiing textile world. Thing is, they’re easily cleaned and renewed to a nearly-new state of adhesive glory. True? We test.

When new, Contour Hybrid ski touring climbing skins are not the stickiest skins we’ve used. Other more aggressive glues might still be better in extreme conditions (e.g, re-application in a rain storm, below zero F temps, those sorts of things). But the Hybrids are easy to handle, and with good skin hygiene they worked fine in our normal Colorado conditions. That is until recently, when they quit sticking as well as we’d like. I just figured this was the usual we’d been dealing with for decades. Meaning perhaps time for new skins, or an inconvenient re-glue.

I was wrong.

Lucky for me, Contour owner Werner chimed in here with a blog comment and reminded me to clean the pesky things, as his special Hybrid glue is indeed cleanable with his special spray can of magic (said to be nothing more than normal wax cleaner, but hey, I’d rather use his recommended product).

A-B test is easy. We installed one renewed skin and one we didn’t touch. Cleaning appears to have worked — with impressive results. We’ll torture test and report back here. In the interim, Werner claims that cleaning restores nearly new condition to the stickum. I’d agree, “nearly new.” Meaning if you’ve found the forgiving nature of Contour Hybrid to be to your liking, but you’ve noticed a reduction in tack, clean them.

Shop rag after use as a cleaning scrub. The skins appeared clean, but obviously had some residue from who knows what (perhaps from those cute canines we love so much on the skin track?), as well as invisible dust.