Does cloth weight matter when fixing dings?

General Discussion
1

So, I get why cloth weight matters when glassing a board… but when fixing dings, does it really matter?  I am working on a few dings, and my neighbor just dropped off a huge bag of leftover cloth that’s like 12oz or 10oz or something, maybe more.  It’s that cloth that you can get at AutoZone or whatever for cars (not the super thick fiberglass mat, the actual cloth).  I’m out of thinner cloth and I ony have a few dings to do :confused:

So if I saturate that stuff and put it on, and then sand it down to where it’s about the thickness of a 2oz or 4oz patch, will that be as strong as using actual thin cloth?  I’m asking because I can imagine that it might be the case where, say, strand count is what matters, and 12oz cloth has thicker strands, so by the time you sand it down to 4oz thickness it has like 1/3 the number of strands as 4oz.  Or something like that.

So, thoughts?  If I sand thick cloth down, is that comparable to thin cloth?  Or should I just suck it up and get a few yards of thinner cloth… it’ll get used, but it also means a few more days before I can get this board in the water!  :)

Thanks Swaylocks!!

2

Given that all cloth is woven in one way or another, sanding 10 oz until it has the thickness of 4 oz will completely destroy the integrity of the cloth. Might as well use mat if you’re going to do that.

When it comes to dings, it is better to use stepped layers of thin cloth, rather than one layer of thicker stuff. I cannot recall the last time I did a ding job with anything heavier than 6oz. There’s a reason for that.

3

Hi,

If u do the repair with heavier cloth, the ding area will be stiffer/stronger than the rest of the board so when it’ll spring it’ll likely crack at the limit of the repair because of this difference.

Better use about the same cloth quantity and quality as you did while laminating.

You can use those scrap for fin panels ? depending on their size…

Z.

4

Sometimes “Free” is a curse. I’m with Sammy.