Blast Nose Repair

I used my Fanatic Blast for windfoiling for 2 years. It was great for this because it came with a foil-ready finbox and allowed me to try out windfoiling without having to buy a separate windfoil board. One downside to this is that it’s pretty common for people to catapault while learning to windfoil (catapault: a type of crash where the wind whips the sail and rider forward over the front of board, aka “going over the bars”). Unfortunately, for the longest time I did not have any protection between the mast and the nose of the board. This meant that on a few occasions, the mast smashed down on the nose and cracked the paint and sometimes even through the fiberglass.

I repaired any cracks with a few layers of fiberglass and epoxy and I was satisfied with the structural integrity of the repair. I didn’t focus very much on the aesthetics of the repairs though. Below is a photo of the first crack that I had to repair:

But after about 5 repairs, the nose started looking pretty bad.

I decided to sand and fair out everything, put some fiberglass over the whole nose area, and then paint. First I sanded down all my repairs:

Next, I covered the whole nose with two layers of 4oz tight weave fiberglass.

I then needed to get everything nice and smooth. To do this, I mixed glass bubbles with epoxy to make a thickened epoxy. I coated the entire area with a thin layer of the thickened epoxy. Then I sand everything down so that all the low spots and little holes get filled in. The goal is to have everything at the same level/thickness. Here is a photo of what this looked like prior to sanding down the thickened epoxy.

After sanding it was time to spray a coat of primer-filler on the nose. Next, I took the board down to Lordco, a local autoparts store. They scanned the board to come up with a paint match. It cost me about $35 for a spraycan of paint that was a 70% colour match. This is how it looks after painting:

This certainly isn’t perfect. Close inspection reveals some uneveness in the finishing. But overall it looks pretty good and I’m satisfied.