I have been asked to repair 2 super light epoxy lifeguard race boards. One board has a black carbon fiber lay up, the other a dark blue lamination. Both boards have significant delamination from the heat build up from being left in the sun. I should stress that both boards are imported from Australia and not made from the products of any one that posts on this site. The black board has delaminated for about 4 ft in the area of the deck that is concaved, or dished out, for the paddler. The dark blue board has a 2ft x 2ft area on the bottom that has bubbled. The manufacturer of the carbon fiber board has told me that the foam itself may have been damaged or even cooked/melted by the extreme heat build up that caused the delam, however I have not cut it open yet to look as I’m still just giving a quote at this stage. I am planning to repair both boards using Resin Research products if “The Fly” (Paul Baymore) can spare me some when I pick up my boards from his shop later this week. Anyway, long story short, any advice. Should I just cut out the delaminated section, repair any foam damage with a Q-cell epoxy mix and reglass the area as best I can or is there a better way. I don’t want them to be sent to the land fill because apart from the obvious damage, both boards are in reasnoble condition.
This may be a bit crude for the boards you are trying to fix, but I typically repair delam bubbles in my hand-shaped epoxy boards by drilling a small hole on each end of the delam and injecting epoxy into the cavity (you can get various size syringes at farm animal feed stores). Once you have a good amount inside, work the resin throughout the entire area with your hand (or some sort of small roller if the surface is flat enough) forcing excess resin out of the holes. After you feel like you have all surface areas coated well (might have to repeat proceedure several times), weight or clamp the entire surface area, making sure all areas of the separated glass are touching the foam until the resin has hardened (might have to improvise your clamping/weighting system depending on the surface shape — maybe some semi-dense foam padding with a piece of plywood backing for the concave area. I typically don’t use cloth to seal the drill holes, but would probably be a good to do so in this instance. Not sure how well this approach would work, but might be an option to explore.
My apologies Greg.
At the size of the repair your doing I think I would cut the delamination area away and reglass. The syringe method is generally more for smaller delams. If there is some foam melted, use epoxy with microballoons to fair the foam before laminating. No need for apologies. You are not EVEN the first to misspell my name.
I just fell in love with 4 pcf 2-part urethane foam from US Fiberglass this past week. I was doing a repair job on a friend’s board that had a large 12" delam spot on the rear deck. Under the delam was about 1/2" thick of gray spongy foam. I ground out ALL of the bad foam until I hit just pure white, and then filled in the massive depression with 4 lb pour foam. About 10 minutes later and some light sanding, I had the deck faired back to original level. The foam is slightly pourous, so I then spackled with microballons and epoxy. You can now barely put a thumb impression in the deck, and I haven’t even put glass on it yet. I’m real happy with it, as it seems to fill large gaps awesome – and quickly. But alas, it may just melt polystyrene foam. Anyone know for sure?
Urethane foam DOES NOT melt polystyrene. In fact they work very well together.
Awesome. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t have any foam laying around to try. Thanks for the follow up.
I have a similar problem here with a walden magic model. The former owner left it in the sun. There is around a 3 foot long bubble on the top and bottom of the nose. Any ideas of the best way to fix it? I have a video of it on YouTube showing the bubble better than the picture...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwChWjsTQ1M&feature=youtube_gdata_player
