MegaChess - Fiberglass Care and Maintenance

Care and Maintenance

Breakage Repair
Much as we love to sell spares, you may wish to present the damaged kings at a local pleasure boat repair yard. They have experience fixing all kinds of fiberglass dings. If you have a (maintenance) employee with experience using Bondo (auto body repairs), he may be able to handle it as well.

One technique I use to fix cracks requires two people. Lay the piece crack up, secure or with a third person holding it in place. Another person goes along sticking the razor blade of a box cutter in the crack, wiggling it and turning it so the crack parts a little. The other guy follows along with the glue, squeezing it into the crack before the box cutter guy releases it. When the crack closes, wipe off the residue from the outside immediately, and let the excess inside just drip into the piece. My favorite glue for this is called Amazing Goop (www.amazinggoop.com) with its industrial equivalent called E-6000.

If the crack is so large as to be loose, we wrap bungie cords around the piece to draw together the crack, hooks away from the crack.

For short cracks that cannot be parted with a box cutter, we prefer Superglue, but only for mating surfaces that can be made tight against one another during drying. Because of its low viscosity, Superglue will run into the crack -- and down the piece if you're not careful. This is also a two-person job, one guy ready with a rag to wipe up excess. He has to wipe within 2 seconds.

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Whether putting on a patch or fixing a chess piece that is not round, the same three steps are required.

First, apply a filler material of epoxy with catalyst as shown below. The brand we use is called "Bondo". It is a cheap filler used in the USA to fix dents in automobiles. You may use a different brand as long as it is a high-quality, two-part epoxy and catalyst.

Second, pull a smooth, flexible metal plate over the epoxy to produce the contour of the chess piece as shown below. Important is that this second step must be done quickly before the epoxy begins to harden. Done that way, it requires very little sanding.

Third, apply texture and paint to match the rest of the surface.
Bottom Trim

Chess players sometimes put down a chess piece with some force, causing the bottom edge to chip against a hard chess board. To reduce that, the chess piece needs some edge trim along the bottom to absorb the impact.

If the bottom trim that came with your chess piece is gone or broken, get a length of foam insulation used by plumbers around pipes to keep them from freezing. The picture at left shows its cross section.

The complete technical name is "engineered polymer closed cell foam insulation". The foam insulation comes in sticks about 2 yards (meters) long. The outside diameter is about 1.5" (3.75 cm). The inside diameter, which would be the pipe to insulate, is about 0.5" (1.5 cm).

You can buy such foam insulation at most large hardware stores. To apply the insulation, put glue on one end inside the slit as shown at right, and then slip that over the bottom edge of a chess piece.

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Clamp that end to the chess piece. Slide the rest of the foam insulation over the rest of the edge without glue. Cut off the excess from the foam insulation, and put glue on the other end of the foam insulation. Slide that over the chess piece and push it against the other end of the foam insulation, end to end, and then clamp the second end as well as shown at left.

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More than one piece of foam insulation may be glued on one chess piece this way as long as both pieces are glued end to end.

When finished, the chess piece should look as on the right.