Hi,
I bought a used Hobie longboard that was in great condition except that it has many pressure dings on the top from either a heavy previous owner or the foam was superlight weight. Anyhow I am looing for a way to reduce the pressure dings. Is there any way to raise them up or fill them in with resin. Is there any way at all??? Thank you.
you don’t want to do that. if they grow larger, it might lead to a delam which would be worth repairing, but pressure dings are inevitable and they don’t really compromise the integrity of the board. in fact, any repair attempt would likely do more harm than good. just surf the board and have fun with it…you’ll learn to love your dings…they give a board character (like the crack in the liberty bell).
yep-just ride it with full on charge-since it is already “broke in” you won’t have to worry about dingin’ it-just go off!
jeez- two deck questions about Hobies in the same night.
ok, first off, the Hobies of recent vintage are notorious for weak deck glassing. very easy to stomp 'em to death. you can’t get the dents back up. and you have a very good chance of deck delamination either starting there or it’s there now and just moving along and getting bigger, like cancer. filling with resin is just gonna add weight.
what i suggest in cases like this is deck pads, lots of 'em. they will ease the impact of heels and feet and hide the dents. they may look funny, but they will add useable life to the board, so it’s your call.
hope that’s of use
doc…
Just another quick question. Would adding another layer of 6oz cloth over the pressure dinged area help prevent further damage? Has anyone done this? Thanks
yes, two layers of 4oz, no hot or gloss coat, just sand it lightly with 80 so smooth out the real sharp edges that cut your wetsuit.
You have to sand deck to be patched, including down the dents.
Resin will naturally pool IN the dents, making it stronger there.
Why no hot or gloss coat?
Your board is already sealed.
You are gonna wax over it, so cosmetic is no reason to add weight.
Hot can add some stiffness, but it’s already pooled where you need it the most.
Weight of hot and gloss together is about equal to the lam you are adding.
Double the weight? No reason.
I was looking at another thread that was similar to my inquiry here and one person suggested not to put another deck patch over the pressure dings because of decreased flexability, weight, and it might actually do more damage to the board. Other people said that it was a good idea to put the deck patch over the pressure dings to prevent further damage. With a 7’8" funboard and the smaller waves in Rhode Island where I live, extreme performance really isn’t all too important. In this case should I go ahead with the deck patch?? Thank you
well- basicly it’s like this-
Decreased flexibility isn’t an issue, really, 'cos of the increased flexibility of the sections that are dented, crushed in and possibly a little delaminated - you’d just be getting back to square one there. If you’re worried about that, do your repair in 2 layers, as suggested, with one layer overlapping the other by a fair amount, 4" or more all around anyhow.
Added weight - with 2 layers of 4 oz cloth and a decent job of glassing , around the same as the difference between having fries with your cheeseburger at lunch or not. Any added weight of as small an amount as that is not relevant and definitely nothing to do with strength or weakness of the board. Truthfully, if the board had been made with heavier glass and heavier foam, you wouldn’t be having these problems and chances are you’d never notice it.
Making conventional boards too light, especially fun shapes and longboards, is one of the ways the mainstream surf industry has lost sight of the needs of the average surfer. Hyping overly lightweight conventional boards to the average surfer is a downright disservice and a sad example of planned obsolescence … woops, up on my soapbox again, sorry about that. Anyways…
Doing more damage to the board… well, hey, considering the probability ( probability, not possibility ) that further heel dings, stomps and so forth will soon make for a delaminated deck, which is as difficult-to-impossible a job of repairs as there is ( more difficult and less likely to be a permanent cure than putting a busted board back together, in my experience) , I’d have to say that that’s not quite looking at it the right way, y’know?
Go ahead with the deck patch, doing it the way Lee said, and don’t hesitate to come back if ya need a little help along the way.
hope that’s of use
doc…
Thanks guys for your replies. Doc, so far the pressure dings haven’t lead to any delamination, so I guess doing this deck patch thing is better now than if it were slightly delaminated. Anyhow, just wondering if you could further describe the overlapping of the two 4 oz fiberglass sheets. is the top sheet going to overlap 4" over the bottom one or vise-versa? Thanks again for all of your support!
if the pressure dings are too severe the patch might not want to stay on there. the surface could be too uneven.
Let’s see - really, I might go with the top layer overlapping the lower, as there would be less chance of sanding through where you don’t want to. As Lee said, you just need to touch the edges so that you won’t cut suit or feet.
So, sand the area to be covered quite carefully, glass with the first layer, sand the edges of that when it’s hardened some ( you can use laminating resin for this layer ) and then put the top layer on overlapping at least 4" all around. Use sanding resin for this layer.
Squeegee the excess resin out, but don’t go nuts on it, leave enough so ya just see the weave patern but not to the point where it’s dry and you start seeing fibers. When that has dried, again just ease the edges and you’re good to go.
hope that’s of use
doc…
Thanks again for your detailed suggestions. I was choosing to either do the fiberglass deck patch or try to find some sort of stomp pad for the deck that I could place over the pressure dings to prevent further damage. I was looking for a clear traction pad so that people wouldn’t even know it was there. I found a couple web sites with clear car floor mats that would provide a soft coushion for the deck. Check one of them out here.
Do you think this would be a better alternative to adding the deck patch or not. Thanks and hopefully this will be the last question i have regarding this matter.
-Ben
Glass the deck, using rounded rather than straight across rail to rail shape.
Forget that floormat. Prolly weighs a ton, gives no dent resistance, traps water between it and board, prolly slippery when wet.
Hi Ben,
Again, Lee is right, the car floor mat isn’t a pad, it offers zero impact absorption from stomps and such, and it won’t do ya any good, pure and simple. That’s a clear vinyl, not a neoprene foam of some sort. Gawd knows how you’d stick it to the deck, too.
Me, I would go with the repair/reinforcement and a neoprene pad in major traffic areas. The first to fix what has already happened, the second to help keep it from happening again.
Look, this isn’t a Paul Jensen wood Stradivarius of a board or an older ‘classic’, it’s a recent vintage fun shape that isn’t glassed real strong. Use pads, they help. I realise the look of them isn’t stylish, but neither is the browned, waterlogged look of a delammed deck.
Also, like Lee sez, those rounded edges help on a patch, not only blends in appearance-wise but there’s no immediate transitions straight across the board to either trip ya or abruptly change the flex characteristics of the board and trigger a break.
Yeah, Lee and I are double- teaming ya here. There is really no way out of beefing up the deck, not if ya want the board to last a while.
Might be that you can’t see any deck delamination happening yet, but I assure you it’s there under those dents, I have fixed too many of that brand of board to think otherwise. By the time you can see it, it’s too late and the fix is expensive, heavy and in the long run it doesn’t work too well anyhow. Done a lot of those too - miserable, expensive job.
A deck patch will stiffen up the glass that’s there, keep it from coming up and away from the foam and then that tiny delam won’t spread , which is Very Important.
Give ya a paralell example - buddy of mine owns a restaurant. Well, for years we were patching tiles in the kitchen floor, where traffic and underlying weaknesses in the subfloor and such gave the tile no support. Moisture leaked in through the cracked tiles and weakened everything further ( as it will with the dents and tiny, just about invisible cracks on your board ) . It was a pain, and we did it every year to a major part of the floor. Then, we said ‘bag this’ and put down a new subfloor and a new seamless floor system that works like a sonofagun. Haven’t had to do anything since then, and it’s been several years. In terms of time and repairs saved, it’s just about paid for itself. Wish we had done that years before - would have saved my knees considerable wear and tear.
Ok, so that wasn’t such a great example, still, the moral of the story is this:
Do the right thing now- you save a lot of work later.
hope that’s of use
doc…
Doc, Lee and others…once again thanks so much for your input. Consider my questions answered and this thread over with. I couldn’t imagine being on the other end of my questions but you guys did a great job thanks.
-Ben
Haaaa! Ben, bear in mind that I didn’t come up with all this myself. I learned it someplace, maybe in bits and pieces and put it together, but I asked questions and pestered and so forth.
Imagine how much of a pain in the @ss I was! You’re at least polite.
Besides, and I am gonna be a leetle presumptuous and presume that I can speak for Lee too, there is an obligation to the people who taught us, and that is to pass it on. A lot of the ‘older heads’ here feel that way, that’s why they are here.
And then there’s knuckleheads like me. We won’t go into that…
Heh- and now, like in a game of tag, you’re ‘it’. Some little grommet asks, you help him out. That’s how it works.
Have fun
doc…
Just another question. hahahaha… no but seriously… I was wondering if it would even be better to use a very thick piece of boat fiberglass maybe (10 - 12oz) than the two 4oz pieces for the deck patch. Just a thought. Thanks and I swear to God this is the last question.
-Ben
Ben, there is NEVER a last question. That means ya have stopped learning, which is a horrible fate. There is always more to learn.
Thing about heavy, heavy glass is it isn’t quite as tough as the equivalent in layers of lighter glass. Easier to wet out, no quick transitions in glass thickness ( and thus stiffness, which can lead to cracking and failures at the transition) if ya step the layers back as you go, easier to make 'em conform to odd shapes and curves and so on. Rather than, say 1 x 10 oz glass, two layers of 4 or 6 oz stepped back will be a stronger, better reinforcement.
Hope that’s of use
doc…