Ding Repairs

Hi all,

Just spent an hour in the archives and no luck. I’m trying to upgrade my ding repair efforts. I just repaired two dings in a brand new board. The board was sprayed white on the blank. I did the repair in the (I think) normal way - sand the dinged area, fill with resin/cabosil/white pigment mix, laminate patch of glass and then top with filler resin before sanding again.

Two questions: 1) can I spray around the repaired area with white to hide the job or would white spray on resin turn out different to white on the blank?

  1. what techniques are used to feather the repair job into the original glass job - will there always be a bump?

A repair on a clear board is impossible to get invisible, so don’t drive yourself crazy or wind up making a small repair a really big conspicuous one with a lot of paint. The only ones I’ve been able to get pretty much invisible are on dark resin swirls. I repair a lot of clear shortboards, and here’s my method: Prep sand the area larger than the ding tapering the low area onto the good glass. Fill using a mix of cabosil and sil-cell or Q-cell. You have to use just enough of the Q-cell to get the right whiteness. Fill out to the edges of the sanded border. Sand the filler down using 120 grit, slightly lower than the surrounding glass and taper as before (about 1/16" at the deepest. Laminate 4 oz. over the fill, hotcoat. Sand the cloth edges until blended, and then sand the whole thing as level as possible with out going thru the cloth. Some weave may be showing, but that’s OK. On shortboards, I sand to 220 and put on two coats of clear satin acrylic from a rattle can. On polished boards, I put on a thinned out glosscoat and sand 320 to 600 and compound polish. The whole trick to minimizing the bump of the repair is the prep sanding. Use a 6" soft power pad and a slow speed. Doc also has an excellent method of preserving the glass that was damaged and filling behind it. This gets around most color matching issues. Check the archives for his posts.

Pete has nailed it…just maybe one or two things I might throw in -

Cabosil/resin/pigment mix is always gonna be a little more translucent than foam - hold the board up to the light and there will be visible evidence that there was a ding there that got fixed. Likewise with the volan repair mentioned in another thread, likewise color/airbrush matching, plus a whole bunch of things on the general subject of repairs.

I mean… you can get awfully close ( in the Volan thread Pete mentioned rewetting/resaturating the original cloth with resin - a very good move and one I use whenever possible) amd the ding repair can be close to invisible, but at a cost of materials, tools and most of all time. If somebody is paying me for my time, and at a rate competitive with what the other stuff I do pays, great. But for a good, strong ding repair for a good price… lets be reasonable, folks, it’s gonna look like there was a ding there and that it got fixed…

And then there is the long term- surfboards that get used are what you might call transient things. They get dinged, they get brown, they get used up. And eventually they get replaced for either those reasons or to move on to another shape - that’s the nature of them…otherwise, Swaylock’s would be all about repairs and restorations , not design and construction of new boards. Do a good, strong repair, do it quick after the board gets dinged so the damage neglect and leakage make won’t ruin a board or blow away any resale value.

I do get boards coming in, somebody has had it for quite a while, and they think I can make it look like new, fix everything, and do it on the cheap. One in my repair rack now, a production board that got buckled, half the glass went on it, and the best it is ever gonna be is a house loaner for visitors- it is never gonna be a first line board again. Try to convince the owner…

ah well…

hope that’s of some use

doc…

Thanks Doc and Pete,

every little bit of info helps. The repair job is quite fine, I’ve been doing my boards for years. I just wanted to make them better and your info helps. The prep sanding sounds like the most important step for a better finish.