hi guys, just finished up shaping a longboard for a customer, its a usblanks blue and its going to have a blue resin tint on the bottom however on the edge of the bottom where it turns into a rail there are about 7 deep air holes in the foam, whats my best plan of attack??
fill them with foam dust and a bit of clear resin before i lam...
leave them and let them fill in with blue resin as i lam....
any other suggestions??
cheers
use white ultra lightweight wall spackle. (the premixed type) make sure you tape off around the holes (a pain i know) right up to the edge of the holes. pack the spackle into the holes. peel the tape off, let dry, and then sand lightly till flush. if you dont tape off the holes, the spackle will get into the pores of the blank around the holes and you will see the repair job when light hits it under the glass. good luck
cheers foamer ill give it a whirl,
if i dont get the spackle right will it look worse than if i just glass it as is?
Tints, and especially blue tints, require a perfect blank and perfect fine sand. Any void or scratch will become glaringly apparent when it fills with resin. Spackle will ''take'' the color differently from the foam, so it won't really hide/fix the hole. OTOH, opaques don't need to be fine sanded at all, and any slight imperfections in blank are hidden forever.
Surfboards are seldom perfect, so you could just go ahead and do the tint and tell the customer the dark spots give the board character. But if he expects perfect color, a tint isn't going to work on that blank.
Surfingdog,
Just by the nature of the question I'm assuming that your pretty new to the resin tint thing?
Like Mike said, any repairs to the foam blank will be pretty glaring. Shallow scratches will show up like deep dark lines. and finger nail bumps will show up as gouges....and any pukas in the blank foam will show up like dark holes. Don't do any repairs if your going tint. Blanks are blanks and they are rarely perfect. If you need to fill the holes just pack some fine foam dust in it, Just foam dust, no resin or home made snake oil mix, Just put it in the second before you roll out the glass. Don't worry about spackle or anything. a few small holes are nothing structural and they certainly are small enough that they won't cause a delam situation.
It will still show up as a slightly darker spot, but that's the way it is. But it looks better than a white repair spackle spot.
Better yet do a mix of tint with some opaque mixed in. You can still see the stringer and foam, but it will help even out the uneven hand of a semi proficent glasser.
Good luck and keep us posted.
although the spackle will indeed have a color variation to the rest of the blank when you use blue tint, it wont be as bad as a hole filled with tinted resin, which will be very dark in comparison to the rest of the board. there are various spackles on the market. the denser (you’ll know by the weight of the package) tend to hold less tint than the ultralight weight spackles. as i stated before, if you tape off the holes so theres no spackle in the pores of the surrounding foam, the repair job will be hardly noticeable. you can also seal just the repair (not surrounding foam) by taping off the repair again and sealing it with tiny dabs of a mixture of 1/3 white glue and 2/3 water. then let dry. the best thing you could do is to test various repairs on a scrap foam bone and then lam a scrap of cloth over it with the tint you chose. good luck
sorry guys my bad on the explanation,
it was an epoxy pigment so its pretty opaque, i used foamers idea of spackle in the holes but probably could have got away with nothing..
cheers for the responses
this is board number 19 for me
Looks pretty good to me!!.
I spray my boards with auto acrylic. Doesn't matter which colour, it always brings out the mistakes. Better than plain white i reckon.
