No we didn’t get it out of a garbage can but we sure should have put it in one. Sometimes you don’t do it for the money you just do it for the challenge.
This is what we started with:
At first it didn’t look too bad. Just some water stains a few dings.
But when we looked at the nose we notices that some of the stringer was missing.
But when we turned it over we saw that it was a more than just a little…
This is not just some glass ripped off but if you look close between the side stringers you are actually looking at the bottom of the top glass. All the stringer on the nose was gone.
3/4 of the stringer had rotted away and the side stringers were pulling away from the foam. I guess from sitting up in the attic for the last 5 years had dried things out a little. Now do we throw it away or bring up from the ashes like a phoenix? My vote was to return it to ashes? I said burn it (not literally I know cyanide gas yada yada) but Austin likes a challenge.
So we decided to save it. First order was to replace the stringer. Get the skill saw!
We took a skill saw and ran it down the side of the 3/8 inch stringers.
After we cut down one side we found out that we could just pop the other side loose. After the middle piece was cut free we ran the saw down the other side.
After getting the whole middle section we were going to bandsaw the rest of the balsa out but we found out that with a little brute force the 3/8 stringer material would pull off the balsa pretty clean.
We sanded both sides of the original stringer then basted it with a cut version of lam and styrene. We laided the foam half on its side and rebasted both the foam and the 3/8 stringer. Then used about 20 bucks worth of 2 inch tape to attach it to the foam piece. This is after we removed the tape.
We glued up some 4 feet 2 inch balsa pieces to make the stringer. All the pieces were glued using wood glue. We had to stack a few pieces to account for the rocker. Again we kept the foam piece with the 3/8 on its side and added the new 2 inch stringer. Basting both side with lam resin and then attaching this piece with cinch straps.
Just something funny/strange that we noticed was that the original 3/8 stringer had grow about 1/4 past the front and tail of the board. The only thing we could figure out that it must have been the moisture of the resin and humidity of the air.
A detail of the glue up. You can see how the dark stringer had expanded. It should be even with the foam but you can see it is even with the end of the outside fiberglass.
First we had to layer the glass to build it up were the glass was missing.
Next we resined in the original logo back into place.
We glassed over the logo and filled in the top gaps with fiberglass.
Looking pretty flat. Next we sanded the whole board and laid down a 4 oz layer top and bottom. Next was the fin. I really wish I had a picture of the “before” of the fin. The orginial fin was almost black. It was so dark that we couldn’t even tell if it was just all fiberglass or wood underneath. We had to sand the fin all the way down to the orginial wood and man it was amazing. We had to seal the wood with our mixture of thinned out lam and styrene and then layed down the glass on the fin. We rebuilt the bead like the original and glassed it back onto the board. What a difference!
The fin.
Next comes the pigment. You know you have to cover that water stain junk.
Looks good Troy. Thanks for the advice on board painting in the shop the other day. Now if I could only get my friend actually working on the board. You really need to post the spidey board. Combo resin tint/wood bits post.
Impressive work! very nice, keep sharing these excellent surf restoration processes.
I’d just wanted to ask something about re-putting on the missing pieces of fiberglass: did you have to overlap it? If so, how did you manage to sand down the extra thickness gained without losing the contact between the two different layers?
You lay fiberglass inside of the cutout (a few layers) and then do a final layer or two to connect the whole whole thing together. Then you sand the crap out of it to make it flat with the original glass. To make sure we have structural integrity we sand the whole board down to the weave and reglass top and bottom with 4 oz. Then go through the stages of hotcoat, sand, gloss, polish, etc…
