Well, I picked up this here srfing board reel cheep like, I bought myself the experience of a lifetime a veritable edumakashun on the proper repair of a surfin’ beard. I picked up a 12 pack and a dremel and went to work the cannibals that did the previous repair on the cancerous delam used spackle to fill the void well that there spackle got warm and exploded, yup just like when we go dynamite fishin’ all them lil’ fishies… I stripped it and now I got the worse feelin’ in my stomach like mebbe this was a little more than I shudda been chewin’ being a newbie and all but, here I go stay tuned for more disaster and debauchery!
Ps. what the heck am I supposed to fill the void with? I think epoxy and microballons!
Yer a man after me own heart. Epoxy and microballoons are just fine, but as this isn’t a styrofoam under it all ( less’n I’m a-seein’ it all wrong, like I usually does ) I’d go an’ save a few bucks by usin’ a halways decent grade a polyester resin, what your friendly neighborhood surf shop will sell ya - it’s less than half the price of the epoxy and fer this it’ll work jes fine.
Ya puts it on with a wide plastic putty knife from tha hardware store in town - mebbe four inches or more wide, like ya was doin’ a leetle bondo on the GMC, use the microballoons to get it kinda like the consistency of Cheez Whiz, then add yer catalyst and mix it up good. Me, I’d use the laminatin’ resin fer that, cos then ya don’t has ta sand it when ya goes ta put on the glass over the whole shebang. Clean yer putty knife off good too, and round the corners a skosh with mebbe some sandpaper, you’ll need it later. Sand a few inches back on that ol’ clth thet’s still there, so the new clth will have somethin’ to stick on. Oh, and ya wanna use some round the edges where ya sliced out the ole glass, so’s ya don’t have a bump there like. Thin layer that tapers down to the foam from that ol’ glass is good.
When ya go ta puttin glass on - see how the glass that’s on there has a skosh of green to it? That’s cos it has what they calls the Volan treatment to it. That’s a good thang, on accounta ya don’t have to get any fancy-schmancy surfboard-type cloth, jes head on down to that ol’ hardware store again and get some plain ole 10 ounce fiberglass cloth, it has that ol’ Volan thing done to it too so it’ll look like it belongs there. Cut it so it laps over the old stuff,
Use some more a thet laminatin’ resin on the cloth, dump some in the middle and kinda smoosh it inta the cloth with yer plastic putty knife so it goes all translucent, like a wet t-shirt contest gets if it’s good, and so ya just see the weave of the cloth jes’ showin’. Work from the middle out ta the sides, so ya can squish any extra off the edges. Go easy on that ol’ pressure, so ya don’t break it loose or nuthin’. When that has gone kinda hard, do it again with more cloth on top of what ya jes’ did and let it lap over a bit more.
Now, when ya git to there, give us a shout and we’ll hep ya out from that, awright?
sounds like you know what yer doin, especially all that wet tee shirt talk an’ all, thanks a bunch for the neighborly hospitality. I will get on the laminatin’ tomorrow as the temp. is droppin here.
awesome thread and nice timing because im doing the same repair/stip and relaminating 3/4 of the deck of an old beater that wasnt sea worthy. Will use all the above info and thanks for posting
Here it is after many hours of work amd frustration I completed it with Doc’s help and reassurance as well as two PBR twelve packs. I decided if I was going to go with ugly and the frankenstein look why not go all the way and glass in some really scary artwork. I have nicknamed this board Frankie for obvious reasons. Its green surfs like a tank and is heavy but boy does it like to glide when it gets movin’ ummmm goodness. Now if I could only carry it to the beach? A couple of things I would have done differently:
1)done a better job of filling in towards the rails, when I stripped it the glass and foam it just kept going!
2)filled with foam instead of q-cell/cabosil resin. It would have been lighter(dont ask how much resin I used)
3)maybe looked at the remaining glass on the rest of the board better before sinking so much time and resin into it, it was left in the sun alot by the previous owner and the glass became brittle, so when I waxed it made a sickening crunchy noise.
4)Taken Keith up on his offer for help, I kinda just went for it and got myself in a heap of fun and excitement.
That was a huge learning experience, so much fun and cool. The delam repair is a lot stronger than the rest of the galss so I think I did an ok job.
Yeah, one way of attacking it is to inlay in a sheet of thin foam over everything squashed, messed up or whatever in the foam department, say Divinycell or one of the nice thin PVC foams that’ll work with polyester resins, they even come in colors. Thing is, then ya gotta deal with vaccum bagging and adhesives and stuff - though this most definitely is the place to learn that. Use a higher density foam and it won’t happen again there, that’s for sure, especially if ya keep your vaccum bag setup rigged and do your glassing with that.
Routing out for said foam inlay…that’s an interesting little project in itself.
Doubling up the glass is indeed heavy…on the other hand, it’s one of those deals, after all it did delam there before. Carrying it builds character. Me, I developed all the character I’ll ever need when those Damn Heavy Things were all there was so I use short, light boards.
Yep - the sun isn’t good for surfboards and many other semi-living things. Truly astonishing how many people don’t bloody well understand that. They spend serious bucks on a board and they blithely put it on the top of their car or whatever, beat the bejesus out of it , bake it, bash it into things… and replace said board in a year. When they could have spent chump change on a padded board bag and avoided 99% of their problems </patented doc rant >…it’s a mystery to me, it really is.
Keith is a good egg. Next time he offers to help, yeah, it’d be a move.
Anyhow - looks good, man. That’s the most aggravating repair in all of dingdom. You done well…
I just finished up fixing a huge delam on a 12’ polyester/polyurethane rescue board. There was no deck pad, and it gets knee paddled a lot. Someone had tried to fix it a few years ago by using a utility knife to cut the deck open right down the middle of the bubble, pouring in some boat resin, clamping it shut, then throwing a big patch of glass across the cut. It was horrible!
So I used a cutoff wheel in a die grinder to cut the center of the deck off all around the delam in a rectangle about 36" long by 18" wide. Then I cut down the stringer and foam about 6mm or so and smoothed everything out. I used vinylester resin to wet out:
1 layer of 9 oz 8HS weave glass
2 layers of 2mm Coremat
1 layer of 9 oz 8HS weave glass
1 layer of 2mm Coremat
1 layer of 9 oz 8HS weave glass (with red pigment added to the resin on this layer)
Then I hotcoated and “glossed” it with Fiberglass Supply’s S929 orth/iso resin.
I fully expect the rest of the board to fall apart around this patch.
It does not explode like TNT…its not dynomite! Spackle inherently has moisture in it as all cementitious products do. They use water to …hydrate and attain strength. Therefore I believe and I have not run a controlled study of this(only my opinion) that this moisture when heated in a sealed environment like a surfboard will cause some of the moisture to expand and POP! a delam or crack. You are probobly ok with your ding repair jobs but I am not sure about the wide use of it. I understand many people out there use spackle for sealing EPS boards and the like but I personally am not convinced of the fact that it does not always hang on to some moisture. Possibly Greg Loehr who seals his boards with spackle has a more scientific study of this. It seems to me that a little cabosil or other related fillers would work better.
Thanks again to Keith who offered me help on my delam repair… you warned me and I went for it.
