Most of this information comes from knowledge gained from reading the most excellent book "Ding Repair Scriptures" by George Colendich (Village Green Publications) available from MailbuLongboards.com , and information gained from among others, Dave Thurbar at Waterworld in Durham, and Eva on rec.windsurfing.
Windsurfing for me is often an all encompassing task. Either you are sailing, or you are at home with broken equipment, where it's invariable windy.
This weekend that I started to document the current repair I'm working out, it was blowing like crazy, here, in Durham. Unheard of, well, maybe not, but that's the way it goes when you have gear that needs to be fixed.
Onto the task at hand. A month or two ago, I was at Jordan Lake, trying to carry my AVS 80 and a 9.5 V8 into the water. Well together, they are a heavy proposition. I ended up letting the board glance the new walkway material at the entrance to the lake. I checked the board later and discovered a nice spider-crack on the rail of the board.
When I got home I hacked away at the damage site with a knife, taped around the site (1" around all damage) then started sanding down. The rail had been slightly dinged. There was crushed material in there. I removed this, blew out the site with compressed air.
I sanded away at the entire area inside the taped area to try to remove about enough material so that I would be able to lay up a layer of glass and not have a larger board than when I started.
At this point I realised that I would need a new board repair stand. My current board stand was two trestles purchased from Home Depot, and padded out with a thin layer of minicell foam to protect the board. It had served me well until now. This repair unfortunately would need the board to be stood up in a vertical orientation. This would be needed to get the mixture of resin/hardener/filler to stay in the repair site long enough to set.
One trip to the boating store to buy
some minicell foam, and I then got to spend an evening gluing this stuff onto the vertical supports using contact cement.
Not so bad, and they can probably be still folded up for storage.
Placing the board in the board repair station, I mixed up a batch of resin/hardener and filler. I watched most of it run out of the repair site onto the floor. I thought about this for a second and decided to rig up a dam around the repair site using minicell and electrical tape. This contained the repair material better, and besides the material was thickening up now, so I was in better shape. Unfortunately, the material would now take longer to run out of the repair site. I decided at this point to use another technique I had read about - using chopped glass and resin. I took a small piece of fiberglass, and using a pair of scissors, cut the fiberglass into many many tiny pieces, and mixed it into the resin. This worked wonderfully. The resin/ glass mixture would finally stay put when drying.
I discovered later that I was using entirely the wrong hardener when mixing the resin/hardener. The hardener I was using was designed to work in 60 degrees and up. It's November right now, and its maybe hitting 60 at the peak of the day. West Systems sells a bunch of different hardeners for different temperatures. I made a mental note to buy some others that cure at lower temperatures. Anyhow, if I'd been using a faster curing hardener, I'm sure this repair would have gone a lot easier.
Next, I sanded out the area using a coarse grit sandpaper, aiming to remove enough material, so that the repair site was resessed enough to be covered with a layer of glass and still be level with the rest of the board.
I then cut some glass to the size of the sanded out area, wetted it with resin/hardener combination
and placed it on the repair site. Taking a trusty squeegee, I then smoothed the fiberglass out
and extracted as much resin as I could, soaking it up with paper towels. When this was dry, the
fiberglass was very flat and well countered to the board, and required no sanding. My best repair ever!
Next, I mixed up a batch of Marinetex, and smoothed this over the fiberglass. When dry the board was ready to sail.
More to follow...the cosmetics...