Surfboard Repair

So I bought a really old, beat-up 70′s singlefin probably almost a year ago with the intention of restoring it. I thought it would be a fun project, but never really got around to doing anything with it…until this weekend! Ohhhh yeah! When I bought this board, I told the guy selling it that I wanted to fix it up and make it rideable. He scoffed and said that it was way too damaged, and that he was just selling it as decoration. Well, I hope he sees this blog because I’m going to make this board stinkin’ beautiful! Here it is in its original form:

Almost the entire top deck was delaminated so I took my dremel tool and cut it off. The fiberglass came right off (you can see the bottom part leaning against the wall in the background).  The foam underneath was all brown and rotted. Also, it looked like someone tried to fix some delamination where you put your back foot by injecting resin. I saw a couple of holes on the deck and figured that’s what it was, but this confirmed it. You can see the dark patch in the picture. I had to chip that stuff away with a screwdriver.

I went to work on the foam with my belt sander. I only had to sand down about 1/8″ before i hit the good foam. I was pretty happy about that.

It didn’t take long to sand the whole thing down – maybe 10-15 minutes.

So, now the question is, what do I use to fill up the hole I just created to make it level with the rest of the board? After some research, I decided to go with spray foam. I saw some guy use it on a repair and he said it was a big mistake. Ohhh, oops. I really should learn from other people’s experiences. It just seemed like the easiest and quickest way to do it, so I went with it. I decided to only do half of the board in the event that it turned out to be a disaster…

The spray foam does seem like it might be too soft, as the guy warned. There were a ton of air holes too, which he also mentioned.  I’m starting to think I really should have listened.  After I cut and sanded it down, I covered the whole thing with lightweight spackle to give it some rigidity (<-good word, huh?) and cover the holes. I let it dry overnight and then I sanded that down. It doesn’t look too bad.  I guess we’ll see if it works.

That’s all for now…

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