Making your colors a bit more intense and contrasting helps, too. Too close in tone, and you lose the effect you’re after. Bold colors swirl beautifuly.
Warming your base but not your swirl colors helps as well.
Try tipping and tilting the board rather than spreading the resin.
I get great results by taking my stir stick and doing 1 figure eight through the whole batch. If I don’t, I’ll get spots that look like more of a “drizzle” effect than a true marble swirl.
Hope this is appropriate place to ask this question -
I’m looking at getting some of your Composite Pro 2090, for resin infusion that I do.
The viscosity specified is 600 cps - i’m assuming that is solely for the resin, not a mix viscosity?
I guess 600 is probably low enough even if that is when mixed, but i’m just used to using resins that are a bit lower.
When infusing a whole board by the method I do, I need a thin resin, so I can keep the temperature low and use a fast-ish hardener, if that makes sense!
Heating the resin a lot to reduce visc requires a slow hardener, and lengthens demold time, and more heat needed…
Also, i’m intrigued that the HDT’s are only around 120F?
Its of no consequence to me really, just interesting. I guess i’ll be careful with the high temp postcures though.
never ever use cheapo masking tape on the sanded hot coat if you’re doing lines or artwork before your top coat. It leaves an invisible residue on the sanded hot coat which comes back to haunt you by not letting the resin settle on it when you’re trying to gloss coat.
Mixed we’re around 200 cps. Actually the 2090 is a bit lower than that. 2070 is my favorite and best all round of that system. 2090 is really nice but quite flexible. May be what your after. But some doing infusion only consider viscosity and there are so many ways to skin that cat that low viscosity is overrated IMHO. Flow media, port strategy and resin conditioning are so instramental … as much as viscosity for sure. Let me know a bit more and we’ll see what you need. I have a contact for flow media which is the best you can buy. gl10@aol.com
120F is without any post cure which almost everyone in infusion is doing. Have a look at some of our post cure schedules on the website. Any of those will bring you up to 200 to 300F if that even matters in your application. BTW no one gets much better than 120F without post cure. They may claim to but I’ve never seen it. And just in case your looking to go really high, we also have a range of Novolac resins. But you may be handcuffed in board building by foam so …
All performed well. Just some are a bit better. Bottom line, ALL thermoset resins discolor with age. There isn’t one that doesn’t. So it’s not a matter of if but a matter of when. 1000 hours is and always has been the standard. It is for polyester resin, epoxy resins and all other polymer products as well. So if your keeping your board in the house it’ll stay white far longer than if your keeping it in the back yard. I have a board in my office which is 10 years old. Has not seen much sun in the ten years and is about as white as the day I laminated it.
As I wrote earlier, there are very many aspects to consider when testing resins and color stability is for sure one. But there are many others and as long as the resin meets the standards and excels throughout the range of test criteria then it’s a formulation we’ll sell. Worrying that one discolors in 1000 hours compared to another that makes 1200 hours is pretty much splitting hairs when there are so many other aspects to consider. Do we decide to sell a product which is hard to work with and dynamically toxic because it doesn’t discolor as bad? I have such formulations and I don’t think so.
BTW polyester boards are what the standard is based on and they are significantly discolored at 1000. In addition, anyone seriously worried about this should consider other means of reducing discoloration, board bags, two pack finishes or painting for finish. Surftech’s never discolor … buy one of those.
Novolac resins are a type. Used mostly in aerospace they are for high temp applications. Most standard epoxies can be cured up to 350F which is pretty high and this kind of post cure gives very high HDT which is a measurment for temperature stability of a composite part. Novolacs can be post cured at 500F which gives unbelievable temperature stability. Again aerospace stuff mostly.
Since kksurf brought up infusion, we do have a new page on our site which gives anyone interested in this tech an overveiw. Hopefully it’s a nice read. http://resinresearch.net/_wsn/page4.html
Tricky infusions involving little or no flow media, and large travel distances across tight weaves obviously are pretty critical in terms of the resin visc/temp balance.
Some of the double sided molding I do flows resin around 1 1/2 feet with no media, and the super thick laminates and closed molds mean that the resin gets hot quick! But thats carbon fibre stuff, so there’s heaps of yellow epoxies and VE resins that are fine.
For my surfboards stuff it will be awesome to have a crystal clear infusion resin - and I like the flex.
Thank God we have time for some advertising. Greg, did you see the thiing I wrote about the new way to do backing over on the WMD thread? I was pretty jazzed when we thought of it. Works great.
Let me know what epoxy you were using and what the circumstances were and I’ll try to help you figuire WTF is going on. And this is on the level … I’ll look into it.
