Hawaiin Pro Line Carbon Boom Head Retrofit

During the preheat warm ups of a Hatteras Wave event last fall, I seriously screwed up an attempt at a forward. And don't let them tell you that so long as you hold onto the boom you wont get hurt. The better way to frame it would be "so long as your hands hold onto the boom, AND, your feet hold onto the board", you wont get hurt. On this crash, i bent the hinge on the boom head, and seriously bruised my shoulder.








I also won the award for most spetacular crash during the event.



...but it came at a cost: a destroyed hinge on the boom head.






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New Boom head on the left, whats left of the old on the right



See that pin, lemme tell you it was a bit&h trying to pull that out. I started by tapping a screw driver wit a hammer to drive the pin thru the hinge. I could do no better than what you see here, about an inch or so. It took brute force to just get it this far.





So i took a hack saw and literally cut thru the plastic hinge, so that the pin eventually simply dropped out. Of course you literally destroy the old boom head, but I saw no other way, and there wasn't much that was salvagable from the old one anyway







I subsequently learned that the trick to getting that pin out of the old style head is to use an electric drill. Once you had the pin pounded out the first inch you could've grabbed onto it with the chuck of the drill. It's much easier to PULL it out than to keep trying to pound/PUSH it out (which tends to bend it and cause binding). So long as the drill is set to rotate in "reverse" the jaws stay locked onto the pin as you pull/rotate the pin out with the drill.



Here is how the boom looks once you've completely removed the boom head



Nice





Brand new retrofited boom, with new 26 inch harness lines to boot, ready to rock and roll!