I was just finishing up my first board and I was flipping it around to sand the other side when i hit the nose on a beam atop my shaping shed. Is there any way i can fix this? any help is much appreciated.
[img_assist|nid=1042527|title=broken nose|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=480]
[img_assist|nid=1042527|title=broken nose|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75]
5min epoxy, new piece of foam ,shape and reglass.easy.
You have arrived at a critical decision in your project, if you go straight ahead this ding will cost you a lot of hours (if you want to make the mistake totally disappear). If you go around it, by rounding the nose off or sidelining the blank and starting over, you will save yourself a lot of time and headaches.
Here is the series of events that I’ve been through in a similar problem: The 5 minute epoxy glue idea will work …if you put only a few resin drops on, concealed on the inside of the break, and none of the resin drips out to the edges. Then you’ll still need a fairing compound to fill the crack between your foam plug and the blank. …And then you’ll have to deal with the texture differences between your fairing compound and the foam, either spackling the whole board or hiding it with an opaque resin tint. Painting the blank makes texture differences stand out more but even if you don’t paint it the texture difference is still pretty obvious under the glass.
If you do choose to repair the ding, here are a few other things to consider:
If your resin glue drips out to the edges it’ll drive you nuts as you try to sand down the glue lines. The foam next to the glue lines will always end up lower than the hard glue. I haven’t found the right glue yet, I just wanted to let you know that the glue hardness can be a problem, even if you use Q-cell (lightweight quartz bubbles) to lighten it up. I haven’t used glass bubbles for a filler so maybe that would solve all your problems, but I doubt it (I bet the hardness and texture will still be significantly different than foam.
My first suggestion to solve that would be to try Fast N’Final lightweight drywall filler, as a combination glue and fairing compound . You’ll have to thin it out with water to the consistency of mayonaise or whipped cream (just as Greg Loehr prescribes for spackling boards) in order to get it to stick well. Tape it in place or it might drip during the hour or two before it starts to harden. It usually takes a day to cure when used as a thin spackle layer but it will probably take an extra day or two if you use it as inside glue. I have only used it as spackle on boards but it should work as a glue too, it’s pretty strong when cured.
Alternatively, you could try using un-thinned Fast N’Final to fill the whole ding, but it might take a lot longer to cure than you want to wait. Although, since it’s not thinned out with water it will dry faster than the thinned out stuff. I don’t think it’s designed for filling deep holes but it might be worth a shot. If you do that, put a little extra on to allow for shrinkage.
No matter what you use to repair it you will probably want to hide the repair somehow (an obvious ding on a brand new board is a real buzz-killer). This can be done two ways that I know of: 1. Spackle the whole board (if you want to put an airbrush job on top of this you should do it twice, sanding in between coats), or 2. Do an opaque tinted resin job (ask your resin and tint supplier how much pigment to add). One nice thing about spackling is it creates a really nice white surface for taping and painting.
Going around the problem, instead:
As I said above, a solution that would save you a lot of work would be to just round off the nose enough that the ding goes away. If you don’t want that rounded shape for this project then just put the damaged blank in the rafters until you decide what you want to do with it. That frees you up to pull out a fresh blank with less guilt.
I have a shaped and painted blank in my rafters that I sidelined until I could figure out how to fix the texture problems it has. It was a cheap blank with bubble voids in it and I only spackled it in spots before painting it, thus the patches of texture difference are really ugly. I recently figured out a plan for it, though: spackle the whole thing and spray it with white acrylic. It will need the white acrylic because dark colors show through a thin layer of spackle.
Experiments done by a few guys on Swaylocks have indicated that thinned-out Fast N’Final spackle and sprayed acrylic actually improve the bond of resin to foam, rather than hurting it. Though I won’t bet the farm on that until my own experience bears that out. I’m just doing it to try to save some of my work.
thanks for the advice and all that in depth process to fix it sound too complicated for me. I don’t really care on how the board will look I’m more concerned with how it will ride. All i did was fill it up with epoxy and i’m going to ask the glasser if he can what i should do or if he can fix it any better. Hope my decsion to choose the easy way out won’t haunt me in the future, but o well its only the beginning in my shaping career (more like hobby) and I’m definitely learning from my mistakes.
Cool. I guess sometimes I’m too fussy about the appearance of the board. I’d be curious to see how the repair comes out looking under the glass, if you feel like posting a pic after it’s glassed. If not, I’m sure I’ll find out what an epoxy/foam repair looks like after I do the same thing someday and don’t feel like making it disappear. I take it you’re not airbrushing it?
You didn’t have any trouble fairing in the foam to the harder epoxy fill? I had a lot of trouble with that on a foam repair I did a while back but it may have been because it was a much bigger ding.
Have fun with the board!
I’ve filled foam defects that were already in the blank… What me? Scuff up a shaped blank?
A tiny bit of foam dust or cabosil mixed with white pigment and resin can match pretty close. I apply it within the confines of the damage as much as possible and scrape it with a credit card or hard squeegee to a flat surface and glass it. Trying to feather it in with sandpaper just leads to a tail chase. On the nose like that you’re gonna have multiple layers of cloth with the overlaps and all. It likely won’t make much difference.
I’ve seen recent high end boards with foam holes and tinted laminations where they left the foam as is and just glassed over it. The holes were visible and a darker color but invisible patches are nearly impossible. Many graphic patterns have been designed to cover defects, a practice that goes way back to the opaque glass and pigment panels on the earliest foam boards.
How about adding a wooden nose block? It will look stylish, and people will think that you meant for it to look that way.
how would i do that?
First, you find a can of worms, then open it.
I didn’t say it was easy, but this is Swaylocks. Check out the tail block that Balsa did here…
looks a little complicated to be doing on my first board, but man it looks so cool.