Right, before we start i'd like to point out that i have no professional board repair experience at all, in fact i'm making it up as i go along. I jotted down these notes to show that it is pretty easy to do an repair on a windsurf board, however it may not be the correct method! If you follow this any of these suggestions on your own board and you bollox it up, don't come blaming me (you have been warned!). Board repair gurus feel free to comment (nicely!)

1. Getting tooled up

Firstly you need to round up all the tools and equipment that you will need, what i have used for the job is as follows

• Something to put the board on, i bought some sawing horses from B&Q for £14 which do the trick nicely.
• Stanley Knife with a sharp/new blade
• Several different grades of wet and dry, extra coarse if you are a lazy git like me to extra fine for a perfect finish
• Dust Sheets!
• White Spirit
• West Epoxy
  
• West 403 Microfibres
• West 407 Low Density Filler
• Glass Cloth
• 1 Can Halfords white car primer
• Airfix paints matching the graphics of your board
• Assorment of paint brishes
• Masking Tape
• 6 cans of larger

2. Preparing the surfaces

I began by cutting away the damaged area with the stanley Knife, yea i doesn't really feel right to be hacking bits out of a £1100 carbon freestyle board, this is where a strong sense of self belief and/or the larger can help  (actually  drinking whilst opperating a stanley knife is not the best idea as i found to my detriment).

The crack ran from 3 inches in on the underside of the board, right across the nose to 2 inches in on the top.

 I cut back a fair amount of paint and old repairs as you can see in the above pics, as well as some carbon! I used pretty coarse glass paper as i wanted a nice rough surface for the epoxy to bond to. Once this is done and i've cleaned the whole area up with white sprirt its time to cut the class cloth.

3. Doing the epoxy!

I decided to wrap several layers of glass around the nose as i was guessing this would be the strongest method i could achieve. You need sharp sissors here! The only tricky bit was negotiating the curve of the nose and cutting the glass so it would lay flat. I wanted to try and use a few layers of glass and lay them with the fibres crossing the preceding layer at right angles to make it as strong as possible (only as i read it somewhere).

I started by filling the large cracks and holes where previous repairs had been. I mixed the Microfibres with the epoxy until i had a pretty gloopy consistancy then applied this to the cracks. I mixed up some more epoxy.  Make sure you follow the instructions on the container as mixing the resin and the hardener in the wrong proportions can have some pretty alarming effects. Either your repair won't cure if you have too little hardner or if you have too much, the mixture gets vert hot very quickly and when it begins to go off it starts smoking. (At this point you have to scream wildly and fling it out of the house much to your neighbours bemusment). You don't want to put that on your board thats made of foam do you? no i didn't think so! Again you have been warned.

I placed a thin layer of glass along the length of the split (as it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time) then added each of my three layers of glass one on top of the other, aplying resin to each using stippling action with a brush. Take care not to prize the fibres apart too much and don't go overboard with the resin here either else you'll be sanding for england.  Once all the glass had gone down and i was satisfied it was as flat as i could get it i taped it up tight with masking tape! This is where vacuum bags come into play i think. Right, time to leave it overnight.

to be continued.