Christmas/New Years was pretty good to me so I need to dry out ...a board.
OK maybe not so good.

What's best way? Seems to still be 1/2 litre or so in there, based on weight.

Has been upside down in hot garage. Thinking of leaving in sun all day. Is white and doesn't get anywhere near as hot in the sun as my blue board. Possible to leave white board in 30 degree sun all day?

say no more - boardlady.com/water.htm

Should be fine as long as it's not sealed... (obivously not a problem in this case!)
but see the board lady's comments about vapour permeating the beads of foam...

Where's the hole/water? Increasing the temp will increase the pressure in the board and will bubble out the hole if it's on the bottom.. once you're past that point and are heating the water into vapour, you need the hole to be on the top! Vapour goes up, water goes down. Unfortunately you end up with both at once, so you have to compromise.

The board lady has some tricks using vacuum that get around that, but realistically you're never going to get it all back out without opening it right up and leaving it for ages.. I've got a fairly recent mistral on my boardrack with a big open wound (that used to be a small split/delam/softdeck). It now weighs just over 1.5kg less than it did 18 months ago when I put it there after it had been "dried out" in the sun for a couple of days.

If it's really wet still, use a wick to speed up the drying - a bit of paper towel shoved into the wound and left really open on the outside will help heaps especially if there's a bit of air movement.

My all time favorite is the board spinner though.. strap your board to a motorised contraption, and spin it at several hundred rpm in the back garden so that the centrifugal force spins the water right out. Extra points for taking out the neighbour's cat!

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555 said...

Should be fine as long as it's not sealed... (obivously not a problem in this case!)

Nope, I had two choices:

a) Strap her to the roof of my car and drive home 20 minutes in 30knot, torrential rain, uncovered. This was bound to introduce even more water.

b) Seal her up with nead-it and go back out there. I'd had one run before I noticed the gaping hole in the existing nead-it and, well ...couldn't resist. By the way the nead-it Ii've got says work time 20 minutes, cure time 60 minutes. Cures underwater

Let me explain I am very fond of this board but it is a 2nd hand very cheapy. I've paid far less to stress far less, it looks like it has already used up 9 lives. If it survives, and it will, it will be good enough.

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Where's the hole/water? Increasing the temp will increase the pressure in the board and will bubble out the hole if it's on the bottom.. once you're past that point and are heating the water into vapour, you need the hole to be on the top! Vapour goes up, water goes down. Unfortunately you end up with both at once, so you have to compromise.

D'oh! Of course.

You can use a cheap aquarium pump to suck air through the board. Put it on the pump day and night and bog it up to go sailing then put it back on the sucker. Do the sucking at the wound site not the vent.

Small aquarium pumps move about 3/4 litre/minute according to my test. They work at low pressure, approx 200 to 300 mm head of water so its easy to cobble together some air handeling gubbins with nothing more than pet bottles, vinyl tubing, and silicone. A nice detail I discovered for a sucker bell (thats what I call the funnell that I put over the wound) is the top of a pet bottle. Its super easy to attach a vinyl tube to the screw cap with silicone and if you put the cut edge of the bottle on a hot plate it shrinks as it softens and makes a nice flat flange to take a bead of silicone to seal it against the board. Of course that wont work for a ding on the rail.

You can get a bit fancy by conditioning the air before it gets sucked through the vent. I ran it through a bucket with damp rid and then to a low wattage light bulb to warm it up so the air was a little dryer and warmer than ambient air. I'd like to be able to skite about the efficacy of this this system but all I can say is it seems to work. I haven't used it much and I havent done any bench marking.