I need to install a leash plug. I am not a shaper or skilled and just have to do this one job since there is no access to a professional at the moment.
The board already has a 30 mm (1 3/16") exact hole with the interior of it glassed (see attachment). I am wondering if I should try using a plug that matches the hole exactly (30 mm) or use one with a smaller diameter?
If I use 30 mm it will be very difficult to tamp the plug into the hole and I might risk cracking the board somewhere (the old plug with the broken pin was very hard to get out). It seems like the old plug might not even have been glassed in because it fit so snug, and there was no glass over the lip/top of the plug. So I am not sure how I could adhere a plug that fits exactly (it seems like there would be no room for resin).
If I use smaller then I will have to fill the surrounding space with resin and qcell. Simple enough, except I won’t be able to match the color (although the board isn’t very pretty) and it won’t look as good as a plug that it fitted to the already existing hole. I also don’t have access to any tools (grinder, router, etc) that could help me do a good job, and as I said I am not skilled (my repairs tend be very unsightly), so I would prefer the 30 mm plug if I could adhere it in somehow.
Clean the hole in the board out a bit. You can do this by hand with an Exacto or Stanley knife. If you don’t have access to either one of these,use a pocket knife. If you are so tooless that you don’t even have that. Give it up before you start. Otherwise ream it out a bit and get rid of the colored filler that was used previously. Cut it out, shave it out, whatever. Make the hole in the board a bit bigger, not the plug smaller. Use a pair of “needle nose” pliers to fit the plug into the hole. Oh yeah I forgot; No tools, right? Fit the plug in the hole with a mix of resin/Cabosil or Q-cell mix. Make sure it comes up and fills the void around the plug. Grind it off and hit the water. If it is a tight fit you don’t need glass over the top of it.
Your best move is to be patient until you can get this thing to a pro. Otherwise …
Get some sort of tools. A vertical mill with an upcutting helical cutter would be ideal, but a sharp Stanley knife,X-acto knife or a small-ish sharp file would do. Clean up the hole, no more. Your blade or your file should be vertical at all times and just taking off the faintest amount. Don’t saw back and forth with the things.Scrape gently, don’t chop. When in doubt, don’t.
You want your new 1" plug to slip in and out without any pressure. That’s right, fin plugs come in two flavors, 1" and 1 1/4", the latter of which is bigger than 1 3/16" or 30mm. Get a 1" plug like it had in the first place or be patient until you can get this thing to a pro. If you get a bigger plug you’re gonna get in over your head. Oh, and if you are buying the plug from a surf shop rather than on-line, every surf shop has somebody who can do dings better than you will if you’re describing your lack of skills accurately. Have them put it in.
Right. Cut a square piece of light (4 oz. or lighter ) cloth,about 2-3" square. Sand roughly the same around the hole. Make a slightly smaller square on the board with masking tape. Tape it down over the hole with masking tape so the layer of tape underneath can be seen through the weave of the cloth. Carefully tape the top of the plug so resin won’t get in there. Cut an X in the cloth in the hole with your sharp knife,
Okay, make up a slow batch of sanding resin. With a throwaway brush, brush resin into the cloth. Slop a little into the hole. Gently press the plug into the hole until it’s flush with the new cloth, any excess resin in the hole should ooze out around the plug. . When the resin has gelled, cut to the inside of underlying tape square using your very sharp knife and gentle pressure and peel away the tape and excess cloth. Let it harden, hand-sand lightly, add a gloss/hotcoat if need be, but only then remove the tape over the top of the plug. .Filling a plug with resin is a bad thing, Trust me on this.
Again, what you really want to do is get this to a ding guy rather than making a project of it.
Sand it down with 60 grit. Tape off area on deck around hole.Fill it with chopped fiberglass strands and epoxy,put leash plug in .wait till semi cured (tacky) and pull tape…cure…sand …ride
*or milled fiber instead of cutting your own fiberglass
No problem to widen the hole a bit. What had thrown me was the existing leash plug was very old and when I got it out it proved to be nothing more than a simple geometric cylidener capped at one end. Thinking that all leash plugs looked like this I couldn’t see how ihe new one would be held in by the resin and not slip out again.
The new leash plug I bought has grooves in the side of it for the resin the harden into. The modern surf industry is pure genius.
There’s two ways to learn something. The easy way is from somebody else, who perhaps learned from somebody else and…
But at the far end of that chain is somebody who learned the hard way. Or who learned the easy way, but just that one time, forgot to… oh damn… for some reinforcement on just why you use a particular method…
And now, a cute trick or two, the easy way.
Take a couple-three layers of masking tape, stickum side up, on a piece of wood. Put your plug open end down on that, push hard, and with your Very Sharp Knife cut around the outside so you have a perfect disc of tape stuck nicely over that open end of the plug. If you’re clever, you mark a line across the tape (Sharpie or whatever) the way the pin goes. If you don’t, that’s okay, just makes for a nicer job. Set it in place in the board with something flat, so you don’t push the tape loose with your finger.
Doc-- Sometimes the correct size was hard to find, but we used to use circular price tags that we bought at Office Max and WalMart. They come in a sheet and are peel & stick. Quarter size and just bigger than dime size. Picked this trick up from factory glass shops over the years. Lowel
Even further back, we couldn’t get leash plugs, so we would make them out of PVC plumbing end caps and a nail. Stainless nails or pins would have been nice but I’m pretty sure we didn’t always use them. Sand the outside a bit so resin would sort of stick to them. Better than a hole in the fin, we didn’t quite trust a loop glassed to the deck, so there we were.
Right? With a surprisingly wide assortment of things, the unit price for lots of … a lot… and a fixed shipping fee no matter how big the order make it a no brainer.Plugs, sanding discs, what have ya.
(chuckling) was thinking the other day that I’m getting on in years, meeting lots of interesting people wearing scrubs, sooner or later that next order really will be a lifetime supply.
Here are pics of what tenderloin tom said. Also DEBURing tool is always nice to have. Don’t worry if hole is too wide but close to perfect depth is nice. first pic is deguring tool, can be used for holes, place fin boxes ,metal, plastic wood, fiberglass… A must of your are placing vents in boards also.
hole is too tight? turn leash plug sideways, put in hole and screw back and forth to true whole to actual size of plug. Don’t tell anyone though.
Yeah, haven’t seen one of those deburring tools in a long time. Got to see if I can find one somewhere(maybe Woodworkers/crafters?? Whatever they call it.). If not, I’ll take the grinder to a Screwdriver. I really like the Futures plugs. The O’fishl leash plugs and fin boxes are the only thing he still manufactures. Because they require no tape off, they are still very popular. Milled fiber and maybe a little White Gel Coat is the way to go.
Lovely things, those, the machinist’s friend for those wee sharp edges a drill bit kicks up around a hole in metal.Newest ones have various replaceable blades, suited, I guess, for the material you’re playing with inclding plastics.
You can get 'em from that company named after a Great Big River, fairly cheap. Strangely, Harbor Freight hasn’t got one.
Keep one by the drill press chuck key perhaps or in the pocket of the shop apron, or the reloading bench (chamfering case mouths after trimming to length) or… you see where this is going.
Speaking of leash plug installation… my son managed to rip BOTH plugs out on a brand new board the first time using it. He brought it to me and said something about making it “bombproof.” I took two plugs, knocked the rods out, inserted a single brass rod through both and left enough extra for little spiral ‘tails’ at each end which were embedded in their own holes. I used wax to fill the plug cups and buried everything deep in epoxy and fiberglass. Holes were cut and wax removed but I tried to make sure that the edges of the plugs were buried in the resin matrix.
I am not a composite engineer but I think the tail will come off before the plugs pull out on this one.
I am working on another board for him and plan to install a center box with a through box leash loop. As long as the loop is examined and replaced once in awhile, they seem to hold up pretty good.
Wow, yeah, that should do the trick. Which has me thinking-
Somewhere in the leash-railsaver-plug system there really ought to be a weak link, say a piece of line or such that would break before the plug ripped out. Say, dacron fish line of a known breaking strength.
Though that leads to the question of whats the strongest leash attachment? So that you could figure out just how strong to make that weak link. I'm gonna give this one above a pretty high rating, but so is the line-through-the-fin-box setup (lots of area bearing the strain) . Though I have a suspicion that the old-school loop of glass strands glassed to the deck is right up there.
But- how strong is too strong? I'm reasonably sure that you don't want to wind up with one leg longer than the other, limits you to walking along hillsides in one direction.. yet another reason for a weak link in there someplace? So it lets go before that point.
Yes, I know, the swivels are plastic, with a brass pin in there that'll probably fail, but how do you fix it afterwards?
