Can anyone recommend any sound methods for stripping the glass of a surfboard to have it re-glassed? Thank you!
Yep- don’t. I haven’t seen a strip-off and reglass job that turned out well. Try anything else to fix whatever’s wrong. doc…
Surfbrarian, I have had success stripping a surfboard, but the bottom only. On a few of my boards I wanted to change the bottom after the first trials cried out for some fine tuning of the shape. This is what works for me: With the board laying deck down, scribe a line using a sharpie, around the rail at the point where the edge just starts to curve downward. With a diamond blade on a 4" grinder, cut through the glass and fabric, trying not to cut into the foam. Start peeling the glass off carefully, watching for tearing of the stringer. Separate stringer from glass, if necessary, with a SHARP chisel. You will lose about a fat 1/16" of foam, so some sanding will be needed. Clean up the remaining edge of glass where your cut was with 60 grit sandpaper on a hard block. Sand the rails with 50 or 60 grit up to the point where you want the new fabric to stop, then you’re ready to put on color and reglass. A pin line will cover the cut. Done carefully, no one will be able to tell that the board was redone. As I stated, though, my experience has been with stripping and reglassing the bottom only. If you start trying to pull glass off of the rails you’re going to lose big chunks of foam, and you may ruin the board completely. Doug
I’ve done this a few times with old 60’s restos. Grind down the old glass to just above the foam, the more glass you can remove the better. Not for the faint of heart. The heat , friction, and thin glass usually will cause some form of delam (good) I use 80 grit on the grinder. Next take a utility knife and cut the old glass off in 2-3 inch increments running the entire length of the board. Do not try to take off any more glass than that at once, If you do you will start ripping foam chunks with glass. Pay special attention to the stringer, glass really likes to stick to wood and rip chunks out. Do the rails the same way. Once your done you can go back and fill the tearouts, yes you will have some tearouts, with sugar and resin, or putty, lightly sand and reglass. The trick is grinding the glass to paper thin, then you just pull it off in small sections. Good luck, and wear a mask -Jay
yeah i did it on an old garge sale board. ripped it off, and made it 5 foot tall. u shouldve seen me ride it, after i grinded off the trailer haha. dudes were watching me wantign to see what iw as doig and how it rode. well anyways, i only slapped on 1 layer on both sides, and a thin hot coat, with a bunch of ugly colors in it. so i fell of once while grabbing my rail, and taking a little deep reef barrel. board made it to the shallow reef, and took a chunk out of the tail. so i ripped off the glass again, this time much harder to do, bc it was newer and stronger, and cut it down to 3 feet now with a rad fish tail. no fins or nothing, just use to to paddle out and take pictures, and stupid stuff. taking off glass can be done, but plan on reshaping blank a decent amount! u arent gonna take off the glass and take down a little rail and re glass without chunks missing. dj
Any way you do it it’s Hell! I am going to do a reshape of a 6’8" POS into a 5’10" fish. I was kicking around the idea of suiting up and running my router @ 1/16" deep with a 1/4 inch square bit and cutting strips about 2" apart then tearing the glass off! Any way you do it…not for the faint of heart! MLC
krokus, wouldnt do it, to risky, u could press slightly to hard and go right in the faom. i did it haha. id just go with the other ways. i thought it would be much quicker, but actual it was worse. it is a pain to do. but if u dont got the money to buy u a new blank, go for it! cant hurt ya. i only did it bc i had no other projects. dj
if you want a blank to re shape, try: -pull off the fins (carefull) grinding the bases… -grind all the resin and fiber rope excess -cut the fiberglass on the tail with a razor blade -sligthly, cut the bottom rails line or the tucked edge line (from tail to to nose) -pull up hard from the tail (all the bottom fiber will come up at once) -easy, begin to push and pull up, one rail fiber (to the deck). sometimes, you must be sand the rail. take time to do it -pull up the other rail -now, from the tail, pull up hard but slowly all the deck fiberglass… -now you´ve got a blank 1/8´´ thinner in each side. 5/8´´ lesser large
Remove the fins, then run your electric planer right through the fiberglass [wink] I haven’t tried this and I don’t plan to either. If you do this at your own risk, let us know how it worked out.
You guys promise not to laugh? If you have a plunge router with a 1/2" carbide bit and a TON of time you can do this… …At a furniture trade show I watched a router manufacturer take a sheet of paper on a beautiful wood table and set the plunge depth for just the paper as it lay on the table. I couldn’t believe it that the router machined the paper and left the table unmarred. Anyways, I did similar to a board when I got home, AND IT WORKED! I imagine the rails could be done as well using a shallower cut because of the bulge radius of the protruding rail. Pressure dents might be able to be picked out but to do this you gotta be p a t i e n t.
youll kill your planer, Its not even worth the time and effort, Ive been asked to reglass boards like this on several occasions and halfway through im like WHY??? you loses so much especially on the rails the time it takes to do and fix is way more time than starting fresh from scratch with a new blank. http://www.surfboardglassing.com
I use a moto tool with a one inch diamond cutting disc to slice the rail. A flexible putty knife helps lift the glass off the rail. I don’t worry too much about chunks, because I’m usually reshaping extensively. A friend of mine claims he used an abalone hammer to tenderize the glass around the stringer. Never tried it myself.