I’ve fixed a few delams in the past, and generally stripped the glass and added filler and more glass over the area. And then did some sort of art on top to hide the damage. Now I’ve got a relatively new board back from a customer that has a lot of delam on the nose. None under his feet as far as I can tell, but the logo is delamed partially, as well as lots of random areas on the nose. There’s one or two large ones, then lots of smaller, less than dime sized bubbles near the rails, but not near the lap line.
I’m going to try the drill and fill method for the larger ones and around the logo to save it, but what to do about the little bubbles? Drill one hole, fill with resin and then sand flush? Then patch with more glass?
Also, tips for the drill and fill method would be helpful too. I’ll be using Resin X and thinning with xylene.
It’s a Ice9 blank, first I’ve had that came back like this. No delam on the stringer, that’s solid as a rock. Very strange.
For the little ones, just fill them up with lam resin, put wax paper over the top the holes, smash dem down with a bag of something heavy like, concrete, sand, dirt, lead shot, small rocks, Iron Ore, gold dust, uranium, etc, etc.......and sand smooth.
For the bigger ones I do it like this. Drill two holes one small, one big...like 1/16 vs 1/8. I inject lam resin with a 100 cc BD syringe my buddy steals from the Hospital. Fill through the small hole then put tape over small hole. Then I hook my gast vac pump to the 1/4 in hole with some cheep plastic tubing and slurpee cup(read sacrificial tube and plastic slurpee cup) The slurpee cup acts as a resin over flow tank, so the resin doesn't get sucked into the pump and kill it. usually if I inject 3 oz of resin, I'll get about 2-2.5 oz back in the slurpee cup. The contraption looks like shit, with duct tape all over the place making an airtight seal around the slurpee cup and deck opening, but it works well in getting to resin into all the corners of the delam.....then sucking it out and laminating it down.
Once done you either just sand the holes flush, or you fill the holes a bit and sand flush. It never looks perfect, but it looks better than a frankenstein white patch that never matches,
One more thing. If you can get a clamp around the tail area. A clamp like a Joregen wood vise, you can fill, put wax paper over the top, and clamp flat. This is a really slick way to do it. And if you do it right, you can get away without sanding
I don't recall you having a vac pump so the heavy bag of uranium trick is the way to go. Actually I've found a bag of sand is more easily attainable - even a bag of rice will work well.
Drill multiple holes in the delam bubble and inject resin in each hole. You want to make sure the resin gets to the outer edges of the delam too.
Use wax paper under the weight and you'll have some light sanding to do from the excess resin pushing out of the holes.