Got wacked. It is a long narrow depresion, about maybe 3/16 deep. I really want to fix it, but I don’t know squat about PE resin. I am good with the epoxy repairs and can sand and fair out an area. Is this do-able? What kind of PE resin? Any help would be very much appreciated.
The board is a 9-6 Bruce Jones Modern LB, Bisect. Valuable board to me. I recommend Bisets for travel.
Many thanks
bondo…
Work it with a hair dryer or heat gun, be careful with heat gun, back and forth. Most to all will pop back up.
Interesting that ACE brings up the heat gun trick. It’s a miracle for for fixing push-ins on unglassed
PU blanks, but I never thought of using it on a finished board. ACE, have you done this w/o disaster?
Careful temp control would be needed, I’m pretty sure the bare foam can tolerate higher temps than
the cured resin, and it’s the foam you need to heat (through the resin).
Greg, you’re in charge of East Coast testing, using your big$$$ bisect as test mule.
DONE IT, IT WORKS! Just be careful not to “burn” the foam with a heat gun…it will turn yellow…looks like that board is a little yellow already.
OK. I will grab my clipboard, my wife’s white lab coat (to ensure accuracy), a fire extinguisher, a six pack of beer (in case the fire extinguisher doesn’t work) and my pharmaceutical grade heat gun and go to work.
ACE, if this ends badly, we need to talk. ha.
Right, it re-expands the gases in the foam and softens the foam and the glass so it can re-expand …but like the man said, be careful with the heat gun. 'Cos too much expansion, softened glass and foam makes for instant delam.
Set it on low if you can, hold it well back so you’re not making local very hot spots and work your way in. Don’t let it get painfully hot to the touch, and it doesn’t happen instantly, rather it goes on expanding for a while after you’ve removed the heat source. What this means is take two beer breaks, then leave it and go someplace else to polish off the rest of the sixpack.
Best to get what you safely can rather than trying to fix it all. Better off with a smaller pressure ding than a delam, they’re like cancer, they spread and without radical surgery you can’t really fix the damn things.
Hope that’s of use.
doc…
You could try using an iron with a moist towel under it…
I use an iron and wet terry towel to raise dents in wood. There, you’re using the wet towel to soak the pores and the iron to heat it up forcing expansion.
On a board, the towel prevents burning and also allows a spread out layer of heat to do its thing. Heat guns, I find, are too hard to control the spread of heat and too easy to burn. With the iron, you just keep it moving and keep the towel hot. Every once in a while dump more water in and iron some more.
It you’re worried about burning, it’s a better approach to start.
Now that is clever. Gotta look for an iron that my wife won’t scream over.
i’ll try this method first.
Greg,
Tell her, “No worries…” with the iron. Use a clean terry cloth - irons are meant to work with water. The worst that can happen is you might burn the cloth.
Just don’t get wax on the iron - then you’ll be off to K-mart for a new one…
Let’s hear how it turns out.
Good luck…
You could try using an iron with a moist towel under it…
I use an iron and wet terry towel to raise dents in wood. There, you’re using the wet towel to soak the pores and the iron to heat it up forcing expansion.
On a board, the towel prevents burning and also allows a spread out layer of heat to do its thing. Heat guns, I find, are too hard to control the spread of heat and too easy to burn. With the iron, you just keep it moving and keep the towel hot. Every once in a while dump more water in and iron some more.
It you’re worried about burning, it’s a better approach to start.
I wonder if you couldn’t just lay two wet towels on either side of the affected area and concentrate the heat from the heat gun on the dent that way?
Actually, the iron-on-towel has two good things going for it.
First off, you know where you’re applying the heat. The steam is right there. With a hot air heater, you don’t know where it is, exactly - I mean, it’s air, y’know?
The other thing is that with a hot air gun - those suckers can get over 600 degrees F, >300 in real degrees. And you don’t know just how hot your hot spot is on the board.
Steam, though - that doesn’t get over ~100C at standard pressure: you’re safe. Heat transfer is prolly better with steam too, heat right there. If you wanted to, keep the heat on and move the towel as need be.
gotta love technology. Lower tech is even better-
doc…
Does this iron thing work on a board where the dings have been there a while? One of my favorite boards has a lot of golf ball size dents, about 1/16 to 1/8 deep.
Gotta love this thread - funny and useful at the same time. I’ll stick to the heat gun on unglassed
PU (if I ever shape any again), but the iron trick does sound a little safer for a finished board. I’d
still suggest the lab coat, fire extinguisher, and of course the beer; let us know how it turns out…
Plenty of gouges like that result in micro cracks that suck water and turn brown. Better to fill/seal it.
(My .02 anyway)
i got a huge ding in PE, but that was when i tripped, an i bled instead of cracking
took me a minute, but I got it
good one.
It worked. Partially.
I set up my wife’s regulation ironing board, turned on the florescent ironing lights, filled the modified variable speed iron (the one with the extra long cord), put on the apron, and began to mow some dings. (All this after my wife was out of town on biz).
I tried to take some pictures of the before and after, but with the gloss of the board and the bad lighting, it just didn’t work.
Here is how I did it and what happened. I wet a thick terry towel and draped a single layer over the pressure ding. The iron was preheated to ¾ max and filled with water for making steam. With only two passes, that sucker heated up the wet towel and the board to the point that it was too hot to touch. My routine was to make two passes and wait. I made passes every minute to minute and a half. I checked the board surface temperature under the towel every 10 minutes or so and found that the board was no where near as hot as the wet towel. I took that as a good sign. I had to rewet the towel several times. After about 30 minutes, I began to see some minor progress. I got nervous around 40 minutes and stopped. Fear of delam.
From what was originally a fairly deep pressure ding of say 1/16 inch plus, the valley was reduced to almost flat in most places. There seemed to be some little dimples in line where the valley was. And there were areas where I know I applied the same amount and duration of heat, but saw only minor results.
Over all, the pressure ding is perhaps 60 to 70 % reduced. Enough to where I am not sure it is worth going the resin repair route. But I will. I also noted that the dark area (the bruise) of the ding on this clear PE/PU board is still the same. And that won’t get better with a resin repair either.
So I conclude that smaller less severe pressure dings on a glassed board could be reduced considerably with this method. Big deep ones like mine can be helped, but well short of 100%.
Try this at home.
…and thats what Swaylock’s is all about… Interesting thread…
Thanks everyone…you really got my ding repair mind on overload!!!
Stingray
nice thread!! but ... where are the pics of the work after fix the pressure dings???
c'ya!