Jan 2012 Surfboard repair: the indispensable skill for surfers. If you don’t know how to effect a basic surfboard repair, you’re going to wind up spending a lot of cash getting your dings, scrapes and cracks repaired by a pro: given that pro surfboard repair these days’ll set you back a minimum of £30 a go, that’s roughly 10 surfboard repair visits per the price of a whole new board. The last thing you want is to end up paying so much for surfboard repair that you might as well have chucked the scraped board away and gone and bought a new one.
Minor surfboard repair is easy. Get yourself some resin and hardener, sand away the edges of your board’s injury and fill. Plane the hardened resin down with sandpaper and your surfboard repair is complete. If that sounds a little complicated, you can make quick surfboard repair even easier with a whole host of products designed to produce a single-application resin plug for a dented board. Some minor surfboard repair compounds are even specially treated to harden almost instantly in the presence of UV rays – which means by the time you’ve made it to the water your ding is all plugged up and ready for action.
Major surfboard repair is a little harder. Once you’ve actually split the skin of a surfboard it becomes horribly susceptible to water ingress – the liquid swells the foam and eventually the board snaps. Technically, you could make a major surfboard repair yourself – you just add chopped up fibreglass and cloth cuttings to the resin/hardener mix – but it’s best not to unless you know what you are doing. A badly-executed major surfboard repair is only going to result in the whole thing falling to pieces next time you take it out in the heavy stuff; absolutely the last time you want to find out that your surfboard repair is weak.
Any incident that leaves the foam of your board fully exposed in areas larger than the palm of your hand is really a job for a professional surfboard repair shop. Anything involving a shaped part of the board (a surfboard repair to the nose, for example, or the rail) needs to go into a pro surfboard repair shop; and stringer damage needs the attention of a professional surfboard repair team too. Extremely major surfboard repair (where the stringer has splintered) is very difficult: the surfboard repair person will have to strip the glass away from the wound, insert braces (like a pair of splints) and re-cloth the whole thing. Once you get up towards this level of surfboard repair – unless you really, really like the board in question – it’s probably more sensible to get a new one.