Good suggestion, why reach for the bazooka under my deskchair, when a brand new pack of Beeman’s or Clark’s Teaberry is what the doctor ordered? At least the Beeman’s is good for the stomach-ache I’ll have when I enter my repair-bay to do the job.
I could hot batch it so I don’t have to wait, but I now realize that this repair is even more involved than I first thought. When I took the fiberglass up, I found some minor delaminations, overtop of puncture-style dings. They are small but they need to be fixed. For this I need to route it out a wee bit (separate the wheat from the chaff), then fill with some cabosil yogurt first, followed by the usual rounds of fiberglass patches, first smaller, then larger. As an alternative, if I do a really good job of routing, I might even just yogurt a piece of polyurethane foam back into the dinged area. I like that technique - in other words, make the ding the shape that you want, then cut out a little bit of foam. Anyway, it’s easy to see the action of the ocean on the fiberglass under and near where the fin attaches: the quality of the fiberglass has degraded to flimsiness from the water entering the crack. So I must take off all of the glass where the fin goes, and and a certain amount of the glass around it off (preferably with a grinder, since my sander would take too much time). So it’s going to be nearly a football-sized repair area, perhaps half that size. I don’t mind this though. I need to stick to a policy of surfing another board until this thing is sea-worthy.
And I just discovered the left rail needs a little of the same wheat/chaff work, and I need to sand and redo the tail of the board. So this board isn’t going anywhere for a while.
But the other question you addressed: how should I deal with the fin. I am still debating whether I should just roughen the original fin and glass over half or all of it. Half would be enough. But if I were to grind it down as you say, then I would just glass over the whole fin as in that video I gave the link on. And I can still just buy another fin to avoid the grinding. All pros would probably grind all the way down to the fin and/or put a new one on if they were in a huge hurry or something. I don’t think these details are as important as preparing the substrate for the fin, nor as important as the final fin rope and glass job. So I’ll just make up my mind (perhaps I’ll buy a grinder and go all the way down, and reuse the original fin rather than buy another or glass over the existing fin, which could be dangerous and is the least safe way). Frankly, if I had another fin that was 4 3/4 at the base by 5" high I might just skip one grind step and use it. Just a thought. Another way I failed to mention would be to install a fin-box and go with a removable fin. Strange but in a pinch, a surfer could do that if he was short on case and had to use what was on his shelf. But I now know that I don’t want to glass over the existing glass even though it’s nice. I want to be extra sure I do a nice job. So I’ll grind it off. Maybe I’ll show a pic or two if it comes out nice at each step. I think the hardest part is the sanding and grinding. The yogurt and glass-job is easier.
Later on.
