In part one of this story I drilled 17 holes in a favourite board of mine and filled them with paint brush handles. This was not some art installation, but rather the start of a very effective little repair dodge I've developed to reattach a deck to the internal frame. This separation of deck and frame is a reminder that you must release the presure inside the board using the vent screw when the board is out of the water.
Anyway, back to the repair. I squeeze the deck back down on to frame and then epoxy the brush handles to the bottom and the deck. I use a little cloth to help strengthen the deck joint. but from here on it's now a cosmetic exercise. What I've learned is that hiding the repair is futile, the eye will just find it every time. No, the way forward is to turn it into a feature so it looks like part of the original design. So I'm careful to lay out the initial holes ain a pattern and then I burn the tops of the sawn off and sanded brush handles to make very obvious dark circles. Finally I re-epoxy and Taupo gloss the deck as required using all the associated grades of sandpaper and rubbing compound.
The finished repair always looks better than I anticipate, that's one of the few advantages of being a "Glass half empty" shaper! Trust me, I'm a shaper (Part III) could be a video of me surfing dear old "Numbers" again post repair. However followers of this blog have seen footage of my surfing so they will know that at best it's going to be a comedy and possibly even a tragedy!
