Ok…so a guy with a construction truck backed into my hollow Infinity paddle board while on my racks and buckled the bottom and took off. Now I’m looking at ways to salvage it. Here’s what my approach is going to be…let me know if you have any suggestions. I’m not sure if it is epoxy or PE, but I’m going to assume it’s epoxy.
Sand the area down to remove any loose fibers with 80 grit.
Fill with epoxy and microballons/pigment and fill/fair
Level and sand
Laminate with two layers of carbon fiber staggering the glass schedlue. Not sure if I need to vaccume bag or just apply pee lply on top of the lamination.
Hi Dave, I think you have a good plan there. A few thoughts;
First, I would check to see if it was deformed any. Say, look down it and see if there are any ‘bumps’ or angles in the smooth curve of the bottom and similar. If it was tweaked, a long rigid table/surface, some blocking and ratchet straps are your friends for bringing it back. The board **looks **like the skin was broken rather than buckled and deformed, which is a good sign.
I might lightly sand a little further beyond the crunched area, to help with adhesion.
Likewise, I’m not sure what the original glassing ( 'cos the term ‘carbon fiber-ing’ is kinda clumsy ) was, but I’d call two layers a minimum for the repair. Whatever the original is plus one.
Staggering/lapping past the edges, definitely. Small patch to cover lus a bit, bigger patch, real big patch so you don’t have any abrupt transitions in strength or stiffness . Vac bag it if you can, it will do a better job, the nice thing is with that and peel ply done well and you shouldn’t need a hotcoat and maybe go straight to sand (very lightly) and seal.
Okay, having said all that, I should mention that this isn’t really constructed like a surfbooard but much more like a rowing shell. If there’s a good sized rowing program near you they probably have a scroungy looking boatman guy who does their repairs, prolly looks a lot like me in fact, and it would be worth buying him a sixpack of the good stuff and picking his brain a bit. Shells get crunched quite often, so he’s prolly done a lot of similar jobs.
The driver was caught and charged with hit and run and no license or insurance with outstanding warrants. Me…out of luck as my insurance deductibe was more than the board was valued.
What weight Carbon? You don’t want the repair to show up as a bump or lump. You may have to spread the repaired area out into a larger diameter to blend and fair properly. Carbon sands $#!tty. I would consider a layer of 4oz over my Carbon. It will come out smoother with less sanding. Lay up the Carbon and 4 oz at the same time. Peel ply may be a good idea. I have never used it, but people say it works. I think I would saturate everything on a table and then pick it up and lay it on the board. A piece of 4 under the Carbon might not be a bad idea as well. I have heard of using Saran Wraop stretched tight over a reapair like this is also an option instead of Peel ply. You don’t want to have to grind or sand Carbon if you can avoid it.
Of course! No Green Card or Passport as well I am sure. If they didn’t have his finger prints from his previous run ins with the law there would be no clue who he might be. Gonna be a lot more of this in the near future.
