Tape it down

Nov 16

Dings suck but they happen in surfing. You can’t avoid it. From epic collisions, cars running over your board, or just a slip of the hand and it’s down.

If you’re brave enough to handle your dings then this little tip is for you.

When I started my dive into board building and repairs I’d come across this annoying issue. The repair cloth would always seem to slip and move while being laminated onto the board. The rails were the worst to try and repair. It was frustrating.

Then an awesome friend, Nik Tanski, gave me this great tip. Tape it down he said.

It was so simple how could I not think of this?

When you’re fully laminating an entire board the cloth is held in place by the weight of several yards of cloth draping over the board, but with a ding repair it’s usually small pieces of cloth, the weight just isn’t the same.

Once you have the cloth cut and ready to laminate you can use a couple of pieces of tape and tape the cloth in place. I recommend using Indasa tape for any of your laminating or ding repair work. Once the lamination is halfway cured you can pull the tape off and boom your cloth is stuck in place.

From there you can repair your board as you normally would.