Trailing edge tip of this tail met a rock and I’ve procrastinated fixing it. Would you sand it and send it, or try to fill in with epoxy, graphite, and a tape dam? Unsure if it’s worth the effort.
I’m almost certainly not sophisticated enough to notice the difference, really. I just didn’t love the carbon flaking a bit.
lol my entire tail looks like a saw
i’d say it is not worth the effort until you have more, then you can just create a tray with tape and pour epoxy to fill it
I have had good success fixing cracked stabilizers that hit rocks just using Cyanoacrylate Krazy Glue. The Krazy glue just wicks right into the cracks for a simple repair.
A few tips if you go the crazy glue route:
-Mask the area for anything downhill via gravity of the repair area, understanding it could wick from your repair side around the edge.
-Outside of the taped damn area - fill with baking soda just proud of the surround carbon. Without this, or if built up too much, it’s really easy to sand the surround clear coat and carbon and risk expanding the repair, as well as adding a different level of laminar friction.
If you mask it well, add a little backing soda and graphite, then polish up through the grits you can make the chip disappear, but if you do it poorly or try to get too fancy following ‘best practice’ (West systems 2-part, carbon kitten hair, etc) - you can easily make everything worse. I find the Baking Soda + Crazy glue, or even 3M bondo to be the lowest intervention / most reversible approach.
I’d probably just sand that out and send it. Fine trailing edge repairs on a foil or stab are pretty tricky to get right. Very little material there.
OMG what are you doing to your foils? How does that happen?
Im just hitting bottom on duck dives or while sitting on my board waiting around. Mostly areas where im surfing are rocks.
I think the Hawaii guys hit reefs
Better the stab than the front wing
Just sand flat so it doesn’t cut you, a smooth rock will do it.
@FoilerDan you probably could do a rough rock followed by a smooth one
That’s amazing. I thought my old lift 120 looked gnarly, that was nothing compared to this. Good on you.
thanks all for the replies so far. Sounds like I’ll just sand it flat and send it! I wondered if trying to fill in such a small chip could end up causing a weird high spot anyway. I assumed it’s really tough to get it right and probably not worth the effort.
at my current shaving rate, I might end up with a 140 size end of december!
