Board repair (multipart question)

[mjod]

I have a 98 mistral board that seems to be leaking water. When I press squarely at the rear of the board water seems to come out of the row of footstrap inserts. There is a jump pad blocking my full view.

1. How do I/can I remove that row of inserts and re-attach it? I actually wont ever use the side row in question unless I incur damage to to center row.

1a. What substance should I use for repair?

2. Would it be more prudent to install a drain plug and just not worry about it?

3. What is the best way to remove the jump pad? I started using a razor blade, but it was not coming off cleanly.

4. Anybody know a good place to take the board for repair in the Sac/rio/berkely area?

[vjwalker]

Just finished a similar repair to board that was soft under a foot strap. I recommend you go to a hobby store. There I found high quality, slow setting epoxy, high quality fiberglass in different widths, Kevlar and carbon fiber also in different weights and widths. A week ago I started writing down (see below) step by step what I did but got tired. Having noticed you are not getting much feedback I have written this short paragraph and appended what I wrote earlier. The job took quite a few weeks to complete. I would only tackle it if you are good with your hands and highly motivated. By the way I filled the excavated area with a piece of carved balsa wood and expandable insulating foam. That was covered by layers of Carbon stringers, then some Kevlar and finished with fiberglass and an extra coat of virgin epoxy for sanding. Buy lots of sanding paper because that is most of the work. Hopefully you can cover the repaired area with the foot pads. If not you have more work ahead of you, color died epoxy and even more sanding.


1. Carefully removed the foot pads in question by peeling them pack and cutting the adhesive with a sharp razor knife.

2. Determined the extent of the cracking by flexing the board in the bad area under good lighting (thought of using dye-penetrant but thought that would be over kill).

3. Having no dremel tool, I simply drilled (3/16 dia.) out all the crack ends to prevent propagation. One area ended up being a circle of hole the size of my fist.

4. Broke out the bad deck area buy cutting between the perimeters of drilled holes with the razor knife (kind of like connect the dots).

5. Excavated all the bad foam, etc. under the opening down to sound foam.

6. Sand around the hole so that the new epoxy/fiberglass adheres to exposed existing fiberglass not a coating.