Finished Longboard Repair

By the way, that longboard repair I was working on earlier turned out quite well. Here is a quick follow up for Brenden, so far the only confirmed reader of this blog…

Once the divinycell repair was cured and sanded back to a smooth uniform surface I masked off the board with newspaper, found some (sort of) matching spray paint from the Repco shop down the road and went to town.

After a few previous failures painting surfboards I decided to spray the paint directly onto the foam then glass over the top. I had some concerns that a layer of paint between the foam and the glass would weaken the bond and the end result would have less strength, but it does  looks as though this is what is typically done in surfboard construction. This might be a good argument for buying unpainted boards though….

After spraying a number of very thin coats of paint, in fact heaps of white coats of paint to cover up the dark coloured divinycell, I applied resin and a couple of layers of glass. After squeegeeing out the excess resin I left what looked like a very neat repair to cure. But when I came back to my horror there was a large air bubble. It seems that there was a small void somewhere in the divinycell which heated up during curing and blew a bubble under my glass. Arggghhh!

So, next step was to drill a couple of small holes in and around the bubble then syringe in a brilliant two part expanding urethane foam I have in the shed. About 20ml of mixed foam completely filled the hole plus about 2 litres of whatever buckets I could find to contain it! After curing, I sanded back and applied another glass and resin patch to my glass and resin patch.

So after sanding this final patch back with increasingly fine grades of wet and dry sandpaper I have the fairly pleasing result shown here. Not as neat as I would have liked, but not too bad considering!

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