Fixing your board while travelling

The choices are;

1. Find the local ding guy, who does have all his stuff there. Pay him. There's a place where the local ding guy is me.
2. Try Solarcrud or Sungoop and , when it cures to the color of rancid chicken broth, rip it out and redo it. Plus it won't saturate the cloth all that well if you need to glass something. In brief, that stuff doesn't cut it.
3. Duct tape is a beautiful thing. It will deal with anything up to major structural damage and does a nice job of making things water tight. Try to get the better grade of duct tape, as the adhesive doesn't tend to harden in heat and sunlight.
4. Okay, so you are going to be out of the country for longer than a couple of weeks. Maybe there is no local ding guy, or you've seen his work and you think you could do better with a dull axe. You want a permanent repair and you want to use the right stuff. So, here's the kit you need to take with you.

Sandpaper - 80 grit, 120 grit, 220, 400 and 600 wet and dry . A couple sheets of each.

Glass cloth - 4 or 6 ounce.

Cabosil, Aerosil or whatever you want to call it. Best to get it in labelled bags, so that there are no funny questions going through customs.

Single-edge razor blades, for cutting the glass cloth.

Wax paper cups and popsicle sticks for mixing and applying resin.

Ziploc bags to put it all in...

You'e already thinking, this is what's in a basic ding kit that you can get from any surf shop. That's right. Here's a couple of things to add.

Wax paper - if you want to make life a lot easier, especially in some Central American jungle after you smacked the board into that big, ugly barnacle-covered rock, wax paper is a real help. You can use it to make molds around dings, taping it on, so that you have almost no sanding to do. You don't have electric sanders in the jungle, so that every little drip and bulge is something you have to sand off later. You can tape it over glass after you put the resin to it, to give yourself a nice, smooth surface. Some kinds of Saran wrap work too, but other kinds dissolve in the resin, making a very ugly mess. Try several kinds at home and see.

Masking tape, also makes nice molds, is good for holding glass down when you need to tape it over a filled ding to give it some strength. Get the expensive blue kind, an inch wide...the cheap stuff can harden and the adhesive can die in heat and sun. makes an emergency ding repair too.

FCS plugs if you or anybody you're travelling with has FCS fins. Likewise leash plugs and spare fins.

If your board was made with epoxy resin, or anyone travelling with you, bring some. Using plain polyester to fix an epoxy board can get real ugly.

Some other tricks while travelling -

Fixing glassed on fins is a pain (your travel boards should have FCS ) , worse when you haven't got a power sander. Some of the cheap vinyl gloves you find at the hardware store, the green ones, let you work the glass rope and resin with your fingers, which in turn makes for a lot less sanding.

Lay the resin on thick. While it's stronger and lighter to put on a layer of glass, squeegee out the excess resin and then hotcoat it to fill the weave, then gloss the repair, it takes time and a lot of sanding between all those steps. Better to lay the resin on thick, spreading it with one of your popsicle sticks, mask around the repair and just wet and dry sand the edges. You'll be back in the water fast. Laying wax paper over the repair makes it go even better. Make sure your wax paper is smooth, no wrinkles, because the resin will stick to the wrinkles and folds and even if it doesn't the repair will show them. Wrap the paper around something when you travel, or lay a few sheets on the bottom of your board in the board bag and stick them on with some of your tape.

Lets say you're staying longer-

And you want to do better work, pick up a few bucks from other travelling gringos or maybe you're just accident prone. Here's a few hard-won tips from the jungles of Centro, in no particular order.

If you want to do it right , you'll use the ubiquitous phone cards as a squeegee on the resin. There are often several lying around after they have been used up. They do a nice job of getting out the excess. Saves a lot of hand sanding on bigger jobs. Peel off the resin from the phone card when it's starting to harden so you can reuse it.

They make some nice sandpaper in those parts. The Norton Bear brand is especially good, a 100 grit wet and dry made in Brazil that will do a nice job for all your rough sanding. That, and lots of other good stuff, are available in stores down there. Ask for the local Chinese Store - usually a kind of general store where you can get everything from propane gas to shoes.There is also some Chinese made 220 and 320 grit wet and dry which isn't so great. Be nice to your US-made 600 and 400 grit, wash it out every time.

Last trip, there was this one idiot who insisted on using a sanding block. Result; he wound up sanding through his dings and making them worse every time. Some people just won't learn. Don't use one. Instead, use your eyes and brain to sand no more than you need to - just the edges. For big flat areas, of course, a sanding block is okay, but not for anything curved.

You ran out of Cabosil powder and now there's something that needs fixing and ya don't want to do it with just resin. What to do? Use Talcum Powder. It mixes nicely with resin and makes an easy-to-sand filler. Smells nice when ya sand it too.

Acetone isn't all that easy to get. It might be available in the medical section of the store. Use sparingly to thin resin.

Keep your catalyst in a cool, dark place. The heat and sun will slowly destroy it, which will leave you in a hell of a spot.

A cheap utility knife is your friend. You can find them, the kind with the break-off blades, anywhere. Not so for the Stanley type or Xacto types we have in the States.

Your glossing brush that you got for 99 cents at the Chinese Store - it can be washed out with detergent and lots of water and lots of patience. You don't throw stuff away in Centro if you can possibly avoid it.

Likewise your plastic gloves that you use for glassing that you peeled off inside out when you finished glassing. Let the resin dry, turn them right side out and blow 'em up a little, like a balloon. That will get the dried resin mostly off.

The resin they have there isn't all that bad. Bring your own containers and another one for the catalyst - it's not sold in its own container the way we sell it here. The pale green stuff does a pretty good job and has an acceptable color when dried if you put it on thin. Sand it and feather the edges well so it blends in.

Paper cups to mix the resin in aree not so easy to come by. Ask at the local store for a few of the little paper coffee cups they have. Or you can cut the bottoms out of the water bottles the gringos leave everywhere they go. Those work fine.

Doc

Are you sick of this yet? Okay, wanna read some surf stories or go back to the index page. Otherwise, just hit the Back key to go look at more ding fixes..