This is my mates board that I borrowed off him the other day.
It’s in pretty good condition for it’s age but still needs a bit of work.
The deck is fine and doesn’t need to be touched but the bottom has quite a few onions and stress fractures. No real dings or depressions so it’s pretty smooth just lots of cracks. The swallow tail is chipped off as well.
I only have epoxy resin on hand left over from my board build.
The guy I bought the resin from said that epoxy sticks to poly better than poly sticks to itself and you can use epoxy to fix dings in poly resin boards.
Has anyone on Sways done that before?
Would it be ok to clean and sand back the resin on the bottom and then do a thin layer of epoxy to seal up the cracks?
Or would a layer of light glass be the way to go.
I’m a bit undecided as what to do as I don’t really have the time to go all out on this board and just want to get it in the water. But I don’t want to do a bodgy job and stuff it up either.
Could some of you guys please come up with some ideas on the best thing for this board?
Uhmm- okay, first off, I wouldn’t go using up your expensive epoxy when plain ol’ polyester resin will work fine for half the price. I mean, yes, you can use epoxy over polyester, but why?
Next, while you might have some stress cracks and such, still, they’re not leaking water to any great extent, though I can see a couple of brown dots on the bottom that are. Plus that really cobby cabosil thing slopped on the bottom. I’d fix those, make sure they’re sanded nicely and glass over 'em. .
Oh, and strip the wax off the deck before you go any further. Delams and what have you could be hiding there, catch them early and you can do somehing about 'em, let them go and it’s a real uphill battle.
Chances are that those swallowtails have some crunchies at the very tips that will leak - I have rarely seen a swallowtail that didn’t have problems there. Fix those. Check the tip of the nose too.
as for sanding and redoing all that…look, it’s an old '70s swallowtail single fin. Not some kind of board that defines a great moment in the advance of surfing. Just fix it up enough to surf it and , well, surf it. You’ll never get the discolorations out of it completely ( like those tan lines on the bottom ) , or make it super-pretty, so don’t bother, enjoy it for what it is and if you like the thing that much, make a copy.
