How to fix a damaged wakesurf board

It happens to everyone, a ding or worse in your favorite wakesurfer board. What do you do, toss it an buy a new one? It would be great to be made of money, but if your like most of us, it’s time to repair the old favorite. We’ve covered how to repair a ding. We’ve also described how to laminate a glass-on fin, so in this sequence of shots we are going to undertake fixing a split on the rail of a board.

It should be noted that the rails of a wakesurf board take the most abuse and are also the area that requires the most strength. Typically, as a minimum, the rails have at least 3 layers of reinforcement fabric covering them. There will be one from the bottom overlapping the rail and the two from the top overlapping the rails to the bottom. This overlapping is referred to as laps. It’s important to understand the number of layers and the weight of the fabric because when you go to FIX the crack or break you want to duplicate the reinforcement schedule as close as possible to the original, otherwise, you create a weak spot either on the crack or directly around it. You can imagine if the rails are 5 layers of 9 oz fabric and you try and fix a break with 1 layer of 4 oz fabric?  That FIX will be substantially weaker than the surrounding area.

As we said, you’re most likely looking at a mininum of 3 layers of fiberglass in some fashion or another. A normal glassing schedule of a wakesurf board is 6 oz e glass fabric. A very lightweight glassing schedule might use 4 oz e glass. A trained eye can normally figure it out just by holding the wakesurfer or by looking at the layers of fiberglass after grinding away.

The board we are going to be repair is an Inland Surfer and they are a little overkill with reinforcement. They lap the rails top and bottom, plus there is also a piece of fiberglass tape over the top of the laps and the weight of that fabric is about 9 oz, it’s a metric version so you get the idea. Lots of fiberglass and they are also very sturdy. This particular board looks like the delivery truck ran over the rail!

Ok, so the first thing you want to do is assess the damage and also check for other areas of damage. As we’ve mentioned before the rails take the most abuse and if the board has been ridden with a slight crack often times that will propogate across the board. Wakesurf boards that are demoed frequently take the most abuse and probably aren’t readily recognized that there are cracks or breaks because the demo rider isn’t familiar with the board. If you find a crack through the lamination, look closely around that area for further signs of distress. It could be what LOOKS like a mark on the graphics, but in actuality is a crack under the paint or gloss.

We’ll show you some pictures so that you can see what we are talking about and you can be on the look out. We also recommend that if you let someone else ride your board for any length of time, to just run your hands along the rails looking and feeling for any stress fractures. Lets be honest, “it’s never been out of my sight” is a pretty big fib. You can prevent major repairs and the associated costs by just checking quickly. In fact, we do a test everytime we put our boards away for the day that involves running a hand along the outline (the most likely place for a fracture or crack) and checking the top and bottom for any indication of creases or cracks. If you find something, do yourself a favor and attend to it before the next ride.

Ok, so pictures and self-assessment!

This is a pretty significant crack in the rail. There isn’t any indentation or deformation of the rail, so this is a pretty straightforward repair. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s just a “flesh wound” that crack has migrated through most if not all of the fiberglass layers and needs to be repaired to prevent the board from breaking.

Uggggh this is a mess! Major structural damage to the rails and possibly into the core, whatever that is comprised of. This can be saved, but it’ll need some work.

Here is a tough one, can you see the dark line? It almost looks like a scratch or maybe like a pencil mark, right? If that wasn’t on the white paint it would be almost impossible to see. That’s actually a crack that is starting, possible from the inside layers outward, but that also needs repair. Luckily we found it because it’s close to the original UGGH split.

Here is another one that can be deceptive. This crack was on the bottom of the rail, under the huge UGGGH split. We had to flip the wakesurf board over and look for the fractures. You can also see the telltale signs of the fiberglass poking through the paint.

So we have our work cut out for us on this wakesurf board! We’ll walk through the steps required to repair all of this problem areas and hopefully provide enough detail that you’ll be able to use them as a refernce in the future.

Thanks for following along and we sure hope you don’t need this series of posts right away!

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