I was pretty tired after work today. I passed on going to the beach and took a nap. After I got some rest, I hit the garage to try and get some projects started/finished. This is Nick's kitefoiling board. When he was here last, I was not yet foiling and he had just retired from the Navy. He brought a Ride Engine foil (same as Slingshot Gamma) and this foil board and taught himself to kite foil. I did make it out one session with him and I was lit on the twin tip. He broke this board late that session. He was able to get a replacement sent out - and this one has been living in my garage rafters since. Well, Nick is coming back out for a visit, and I'm going to see if I can fix this board.
The front half of the board split. The bottom deck is still connected so a difficult repair is only very hard now.
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I was originally going to put some stringers in the board - I thought the board was thicker for some reason. Well this board is really thin, so I changed my approach - first step is to stabilize the board so it is not flopping around. I cleaned up around the break and poured in a milled fiber/epoxy slurry. Next step will be to clean off more of the old deck pad, cut the deck front to back to insert four bamboo stringers (chopsticks), and set those in place with carbon strips and milled fibers.
Actually, before I worked on Nick's board, I worked on Fabien's board. The repair was pretty much done, but there were air bubbles down below the top layer and those were bugging me. So I used the Dremel to open up the bubble voids. After the voids were open and clean, I filled them with epoxy/thiksil. Tomorrow I'll sand the repair area and this repair should be done.
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