I noticed discoloration around my finbox, when I pressed on it, water was evident, and had spread around 2" around the finbox. Damn. And I had a waveski competition coming up in 2 weeks. No time to get it repaired commercially (no local fast board repair inland).
What had happened was that the glass cloth had come away from the finbox, and lifted up. This allowed water to get in, and go straight into the foam. Classic delamination.
The first thing I did was take a knife and trim out the wet foam, and delamed glass.
After cutting away the foam, I was kind of miffed, the finbox appeared to be glued directly into the foam, with no glass around it. Well, I'm no board building expert, but I wouldn't install a
finbox like that. I didn't see the point in trying to put a layer of glass over it, I wanted to fix it right (as per
the recomendations in the ding repair scriptures). So, next, I cut out the finbox.
Next I used West Systems filler to build back the foam in the finbox.
Next job was to sand down the foam, and mark up the place for the finbox.
Then it was onto routing out a place for the finbox. It was routed out about 1/16" too large for the box all round to
permit 3 layers of glass to be wrapped around the box and out over the foam forming the bottom layer of the ski.
Even if the finbox leaks in the future, there is no way that water is going to get in the foam now. Now, why on
earth don't they build boards this way to begin with.
Test fit with the fin in the box.
Removed the fin, now installing the box. It's wrapped with 3 layers of cloth, and lots of resin. The weights hold
the box down while he epoxy sets up. I also added a bunch more filler/chopped glass and resin to fill the extra gaps left after the sanding work.
Look at this. Awesome. The cloth now wraps around the box and over the foam. Magic!
Sanding the top layer of cloth.
Now, we put on more layers of cloth over the whole repair site.
Sand that, cut out the glass from the interior of the finbox, and then put on some marinetex to provide more waterproofing
sand the marinetex down. Applied a bit of white paint too (a bit too bright to match the board - ahh, it will all fade and blend soon).
Completed product - it ain't pretty, but it's a totally solid repair.
