How to Fiberglass: Fixing a Cracked Kiteboard

Step 5 Prep the Area and Layout the Design

Once the resin with the filler dried I went back with a palm sander that had a medium grit paper on it and sanded the entire area down as smooth as I could. This is the foundation for the fiber glass to lay down on, so it's important that it creates a seamless transition to the rest of the board.

With the resin dry and sanded it was time to start thinking about where the fiberglass would go, and how much we would lay down. Danny thought about 4 layers of glass cut into different size patches would be good, so that's what we did. Tape off an area thats just a bit larger then the entire space that you are going to work on. Use a pencil to draw right on your surface that's going to be fiberglassed in order to see what size pieces of glass you will need. We laid down a larger area of fiberglass then where the fiberglass was located in order to strengthen the entire bottom of the board to protect against future cracks.

General recommendations for planning out your fiberglass project are to use multiple small pieces of fiberglass, rather than one big one to strengthen your surface and to overlap them with each other by about 1 or 2 inches. Usually somewhere between 1 and 4 layers of fiberglass will be strong enough for most projects, but you can build up as many layers of fiberglass as you'd like. Just don't let any one round of layering build up to be thicker then 1/8" since you'll want to avoid excessive heat buildup from the resin as it cures - it's an exothermic reaction.


(Just to give you an idea, 1/8" of fiberglass is somewhere around 12 sheets thick, so it's not much of a limitation.)