Longboard Retro Days: Another Bing Restoration

Here is another great series of photo's of a Bing that had been well used!

This is a very nice restoration of Bing #445 done by Dave Platt of Killcare Beach in the state of New South Wales on the east coast of Australia. Killcare Beach is 100 miles north of Sydney!

The owner of this board wanted to get back into surfing. He is the second owner. A mate of his purchased it while on a trip to the US. It was in pretty poor condition.

The stringer is 2" balsa or I should say was balsa. It was completely rotted and had to be replaced. It has a timber fin with inlays. This was also restored.

The board was sanded to expose all the dings and old repairs. The remains of the balsa stringer were removed. This meant cutting down each side of the stringer with a diamond saw and scraping the rotted timber out. The foam is in excellent condition. Probably protected by the glue used to glue up the stringer.

The dings were reglassed and sanded. All the low spots and rails have been faired with a 75% Q-cell 25% aerosil mix. Two layers of 6oz laminated over. The stringer has been rebuilt. End grain balsa was used. Blocks were laminated together and milled into 10mm thick planks. These were glued together two at a time in the board to fit the rocker. Once the stringer was fully glued together it was removed, the edges cleaned up and glued into the board. Two layers of 8oz-boat cloth were laminated over the stringer with Vinylester resin.

The original timber fin has been rebuilt and reset. All the old glass was removed. The timber was carefully sanded to remove all the excess glass and resin and to expose the inlay work The trailing edge had to be replaced. Western Red Cedar was used. Two sealing coats of resin were applied. Then two layers of 8oz laminated to one side with 10mm of cloth overhanging. This side was hotcoated. The overhang was used to mould the continuous rovings used to form the clear bead around the fin. Once cured the bead was sanded and two layers of 8oz were applied to the fin. Hotcoated and sanded ready for setting onto the board. Once the fin was set the board was hotcoated and sanded ready for the pigment work.

The stringer and rails were masked and the pigment coats brushed on. I use a mixture of surfboard lam resin and neutral spray gelcoat. 75% resin 25% gelcoat and 3% surfacing agent. The gelcoat is designed to cling to vertical surfaces. This helps on the rails to minimise sagging and separation. The gelcoat ups the geltime slightly without having to use higher catalyst percentages. The board was sanded ready for glossing. Pinlines were masked and brushed on using the same resin/gelcoat mix. The pinlines were lightly sanded and the board was glossed.

The gloss coats were wet and dry sanded with 600, 1200 and 1500 and the machine polished.