repair wooden daggerboard

bjmoose

bjmoose

Member
My 1975 Laser has a beautiful wooden centerboard that I want to continue to use. But it's suffering a bit from the ravages of time, as you can see:
CB1.jpg

For the overall finish, I feel competent to sand off the old finish and revarnish it; though any advice is welcomed. But I'm not so confident on the wood repairs.
This corner has a bad crack from groundings:
CB3.jpg

And there are a couple of places where the board is beginning to split along its edge-joints (is that the right term?)

CB2.jpg


CB4.jpg

How would you go about restoring this board? It goes without saying that it's critically important to maintain the original shape and size of the board.
 
Don't know if this will help, but there's a guy over in the Sunfish Forum that goes by the name of "Al Court" that has extensive knowledge about woodworking and wooden blade restoration. Try contacting him, he's been very helpful to Sunfish sailors.
 
Make some patterns of the foil, top bottom middle. Use MDF, hardboard etc Join the patterns together so that your board can sit inside the "mold" when gluing. Maybe screw them to a strong flat table.

measure how much wood your table saw blade removes.

Cut along the crack lines so your board becomes a jigsaw.

Add strips of wood of the correct thickness between each piece of the jigsaw as you reassemble it in the foil mold. Glue it with epoxy glue.

Fair it up etc.

Alternately you could make a whole new one using the same method or replace the entire trailing edge section to get around patching that crack or replace the bottom edge with a new piece of wood that has the grain running fore/aft.

If you could be bothered, you could advertise for a damaged board of the same vintage and use that wood for the repair strips etc.
 
I did one like that a number of years ago. You can try to inject glue or epoxy into the cracks as they are. Try to open the cracks up as much as you can without breaking it more and inject the glue or epoxy in with a syringe. Squeeze it back together, wipe off the excess that oozes out and keep it held together. A friend of mine who is a woodworker recommended using blue masking tape to hold it together while it dried instead of using clamps because if you clamp it too tight you squish all the glue out and then there isn't enough left to hold it together. When it's dry, lightly sand and then refinish as you would otherwise.
 
I did one like that a number of years ago. You can try to inject glue or epoxy into the cracks as they are. Try to open the cracks up as much as you can without breaking it more and inject the glue or epoxy in with a syringe. Squeeze it back together, wipe off the excess that oozes out and keep it held together. A friend of mine who is a woodworker recommended using blue masking tape to hold it together while it dried instead of using clamps because if you clamp it too tight you squish all the glue out and then there isn't enough left to hold it together. When it's dry, lightly sand and then refinish as you would otherwise.
 
I did one like that a number of years ago. You can try to inject glue or epoxy into the cracks as they are. Try to open the cracks up as much as you can without breaking it more and inject the glue or epoxy in with a syringe. Squeeze it back together, wipe off the excess that oozes out and keep it held together. A friend of mine who is a woodworker recommended using blue masking tape to hold it together while it dried instead of using clamps because if you clamp it too tight you squish all the glue out and then there isn't enough left to hold it together. When it's dry, lightly sand and then refinish as you would otherwise. If you can get the glue or epoxy in the cracks well enough it should hold up pretty well.
 
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