Surfing Waves

Some a-hole dropped in on me yesterday and bailed sending his board flying right at me. I've now got this crease/ding which is not very deep but it has cracked the rail a bit as you can see in the pic. The crease is about a foot below the nose so not in such a structurally important spot. Would I need to cut away the glass that has been creased and put in some qcell then glass over it or can I just skip the qcell and glass over the crease after I've sanded it down? Cheers.

The ding needs a full and thorough repair, the damage to the rail is where the the double lap glass strength has been weakened.
This will be where the board will snap. However you choose to repair it. Make sure you take the rail repair well beyond the fractured zone and have multiple laps to spread along the rail around and top and bottom. Q cell the indentation across the bottom or glass over the indentation but wider.
The board will be heavier , a professional repair would be worthwhile especial if there is good ding shop nearby .

It's important to remove all the damaged fiberglass and foam qcel to fill the gap sand down at least a 2 inch border. glass it and another overlapping 2 inch border. If it is epoxy then make sure you have a power sander. There are likely online instructions on how to do it .....but getting a pro to do it might be worth it as it's going to be a lot of work and even more for an unskilled repair person

I don't think it's worth the money to get it done by a pro at this point, the board is slowly on its way out. I was thinking I would just sand down the crease to expose the glass and qcell over that then go from there but might as well just cut it out anyway since once the resin is sanded away there isn't much reason to leave the glass in there if it's not being reinforced. I've done rail repairs on other boards but never did a crease like this. I'm just worried to make the repair TOO large and I'll then develop multiple creases elsewhere because it's too stiff. But rather safe than sorry I guess. I'm going to do more research on feathering the repair, didn't pay much attention to that on my previous repairs and I hear that's an important part.

The damaged glass and foam represent weak areas so if you cover them up it is still structurally weak and it will break there again. If you used to patch your board like that then your boards will wear much faster because those type of patches represent weak areas which are easily damaged as well. I hear the way to avoid stress lines is to make diamond shaped patches so the glass doesn't go straight across but instead has pointy ends that go well past the break and maybe 2 or three diamonds across the crease over a simple overlapping patch but it is more time consuming and difficult. You end up with a zig zagging patch that doesn't create a linear stress line. But I haven't ever broken a board in half or creased one so haven't ever tried that patch. Long ago I did break the nose off my board and the tail so I have made big patches and they did work but boards were apparently a lot stronger back in those days. My current boards are custom made epoxy board with an extra layer of glass over the back 2/3 of the deck. They put the third layer on with a triangular pointed front to avoid creating stress lines.

A more simple answer , do a simple lap repair , relegate board to beater status back up with new board good result!

keegan,
a quick look at your photos makes me think the following.

Creases are bad. I think I can fix that. I'd probably reinforce the stringer by increasing it's width where the crease is. I'd replace any lost foam with loose Q-cell. It wouldn't be that difficult. It would take some time. Like with anything, the more I make these repairs to surf boards and boats, the better my repairs are. The materials are forgiving. This means if you don't like the result, it is easy to re-do it.

If you do not like to do this kind of stuff, then get it fixed in a shop. Coincidentally, I stopped in at my favorite local surf shop recently. The shop owner showed me a customer's board with very similar damage that was on the bottom side rather than top side. The shop owner will charge $80 to $85 US to repair. This seemed fair to me because a similar used boards will begin at $200 to $225 US to buy.

billie