Reshaping A Surfboard

A few months ago I picked up this old Gordon & Smith midlength. It had too many dings to count, plenty of rotted out foam and multiple sections delaming. My original thought in buying it was to try and repair it to keep a classic like this in the water. After sitting on it for a while, I determined that the board was too far gone and it was time to come up with another plan.

With the board coming in at 8’ x 22 8/16 x 3.375, I figured it would be an awesome candidate for reshaping. So, with my wife going out of town for a weekend, I got started.

* Disclaimer - This is my first time reshaping a board and only second board built. This is not intended to be used as a guide. I made mistakes so please, feel free to let me know what I could have done better.

So the first step was to strip off the old fiberglass. I read online somewhere that you should cut the fiberglass into strips so that it pulls away cleanly and that a good tool to use was a circular saw set to a really low depth. I tried this but found it difficult to set the saw to a good depth that would cut through the glass but not the foam. I then broke out the dremel which worked well, I just had to be careful to not cut too deep.

After cutting relief lines through the board, pulling away the fiberglass was pretty easy, until I got to the rails. I pulled the glass away really slowly but I did tear out a few chunks of foam. One trick I tried was to sand through the hot coat on the very edge of the rail and use a utility knife to cut through the fibers. That way I wouldn’t have to pull up glass around the curve of the rail. This was helpful, but still not perfect.

In the end, I wasn’t too worried about ripping out some foam because I knew I was going to bring down the width by about an inch and a half.

Now that I was left with essentially a blank, I began the process of cleaning it up and bringing it closer to my desired shape. I cut down the tail just above the fin box. This would end up being the tail of my new board, but since it was towards the middle of the old board, there was about two and a half inches of foam I had to bring down. With my trusty Harbor Freight electric planer, I started mowing some foam.

Once I got the blank down to a more manageable size, I cut out the final shape with a Blending Curves template (If you are curious, I used the Nug C template). I decided on a final length of 5’6” because I wanted to be sure to cut out all the damaged foam, which worked quite well. There were a few places along the rails that were so rotted out that I was a little worried. After shaping them down to their final width, I was happy with the results

The final dimensions came down to 5’6” x 21 x 2.25. It is far from perfect, but this is only the second board I have shaped and I made a lot of progress. While the glassing part of this project was no different than a normal board, it was great practice for me.

So I went a little crazy with the glassing, but had a good time doing it. I like to glass my boards a little thicker, so I had one layer of 6oz on the bottom, with a tail patch added after, and 4+6oz on top. This should help prevent dings for years to come.

I went with a black and white swirl and finished it off with pacific blue. It came out a little darker than I originally planned, but I like it. I decided to add a pin line to cover up my messy cut laps. This was done with black resin and turned out well, just a little thick in some places.

This was my first time working with fin boxes and it was a little daunting (my first board was a fish with glass on keel fins). I fashioned a template of sorts for the FCS2 fin boxes and it got the job done, just don’t look too closely. After the hot coat, I routed out the hole for the single fin box and laid it in. After everything set up, it was time for final sanding.

All in all, this was a fun project. I was able to take a board that was pretty much ready for the dumpster, and I turned it into something that I want to ride. The plan from the beginning was to run this as a single fin and I think it was a good choice. I took it out in fun sized surf and had a blast. It is really loose on the face so you really have to focus on flowing with the wave. This board will be a great addition to the quiver.

Stay Stoked!