To make a long story short, I had a quad fish shaped and my buddy was going to do the glassing, so we were going to do some sort of acid wash design. It looks like I have going to have a glassing house do it now, which is going to cost sign more than I had planned. Not only that, but they want to charge $60-80 to do any color, and another $50 to polish/gloss.
To save money I am thinking I can just do some color design directly on the blank/foam. I would like to do something like the acid wash stuff and have seen examples of this in the past, but how do you do it? I have a spray gun like the type you use to paint a car, and obviously paint brushes and spray cans are easily obtained. How would I do it, and what paint do I use?
In a related note, could I just polish a sanded finish board to be glossy (I have done this in the past when I fix my long board, with my polisher, but would you dare do it on a complete board?)
there’s a thread about “Foam Staining”. i think it was started by “UncleD”. do a search. it’s great…with pictures and examples. read it.
why not just glass it yourself? epoxy resin and a few yards of glass. no biggie.
you can polish up a hotcoat and put a bit of a shine on it, but it will have nowhere near the mirror finish of a polished gloss coat. for all the work that goes into polishing the board out, you’d be foolish not to lay down a proper gloss coat.
Thanx for the reply. I will do a search. Glassing it myself scares me, my repair jobs take me long enough and I always end up sanding it too far, then having to do it again, etc…I just don’t think it would be worth it, and take a ton of time. It is a PU, so I wouldn’t be using epoxy, I have thought about just getting it a sand finish and doing the gloss on my own (save $50+) how hard would that be? (I hear you don’t have to do nearly as much sanding, etc…)
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there’s a thread about “Foam Staining”. i think it was started by “UncleD”. do a search. it’s great…with pictures and examples. read it.
why not just glass it yourself? epoxy resin and a few yards of glass. no biggie.
you can polish up a hotcoat and put a bit of a shine on it, but it will have nowhere near the mirror finish of a polished gloss coat. for all the work that goes into polishing the board out, you’d be foolish not to lay down a proper gloss coat.
all you do for a foam stain is pour you colors in a bucket, dont mix them much, my favorite technique is to just pour the colors in random patterns inside the bucket so you dont have to mix them at all.
then pour your bucket out in weird swirls or whatever pattern you want and let it run for a little bit, the less squegeeing you do the more vivid and individual the colors come out.
squegee the colors off, so you can see the foam cells, if you cant see the cells, youve got too much paint on there…no gun or brushes required.
For a better bond , you may instead want to try the samne technique with catalyzed resin instead of paint. i did my first splash with paint and didnt remove enough paint, the whole board is mostly delaminated now…catalyzed resin will bond even if you have too much resin left on the board…although its not ideal, its better than too much paint!
the one pictured below is a controlled design, so its not the same techinque…but i thought it was approriate!
Foam staining is super easy, all you have to do is mix up a bunch of different colors, tape off where you want the design and then pour your catalized and colored resin with some jerky hand movements to make it look random and finally just pull off with your squeegee.
AWESOME!!! That is EXACTLY what I was looking for!!! I wonder if there are any colors to avoid or any tips to doing it, I want to do the complete board, nothing left white, not pin lines.
I really would like something to look similar to this
There’s a reason why glass shops charge what they charge. $50 for gloss and polish is a deal. After you gloss and polish a board you will understand…
Don’t do that foam swirl unless you talk to the glasser first.
I wanted to experiment that’s why I learned to glass my own boards. I do some wild stuff but when things go wrong I spend hours making it right. If you have the skills to do a foam swirl you have the skills to glass a board.
This was done on the deck side with green and grey tinted resin. Lots of fun and very pleasing result (for me anyway). The only hang up with doing it on the whole board will be the jointing between top and bottom… You may have trouble doing something where there is no clear “separation” line. Also, don’t forget to prepare the same tinted resin for the full board, then use it in two successive phases.
That looks really good. A couple things regarding the RESIN vs Acrylic method that has me curious, (i’d rather to acrylic), but I get the feeling that the change of delaminating is there simply because this is a paint that doesn’t end up bonded very well to the foam. The clean up and everything would be so much easier with the paint, but if it delams, it isn’t worth it.
Is the resin technique basically the same?
Does resin add wt (or does it just make it so when the board does get glassed, the resin that the glasser is using doesn’t soak in as much simply because the has lost its porousity?).
Ray, Ya I will call the shop 1st to see if they will do it. Regarding doing the glassing on my own.
I don’t have a professional sander and the sanding pad ($40 for 1 pad and at least $50 for a sander).
I HATE sanding, even my repairs, that is the thing I dread the most, I can’t imagine doing the whole board.
I am not a HUGE fan of working with resin or fiberglass.
I want it done RIGHT
Not sure I want to take that much time on it
Not sure I want to deal with the mess (especially after sanding, my garage ends up a complete mess with just small repairs).
I “MIGHT” be a little more willing to try and do the polish job because, as I understand it, it requires very little sanding, AND, I don’t mind polishing the repairs I have done in the past. I have stripped paint off or anodyzation off a lot of aluminum parts and polished those (mountain bike frame, alum wheels, various other bike and dirt bike parts).
Is gloss and polish really all that hard, or am I simplifying it too much (if so, I will for SURE have the glass shop do it for $50)??
THANX so much for everyones replies, this is really a big help, I look forward to reading them.
the first one inspired the second, which shows a number of different paints and pigments applied on with different techniques and their results. great stuff!
the first one inspired the second, which shows a number of different paints and pigments applied on with different techniques and their results. great stuff!
sure. just remember that it’s a “foam stain”…that’s all you want to do is stain the foam with your color of choice…you DON’T want to leave a whole bunch of paint on there (THAT would cause a delam). if you do it right, it’ll look great, and shouldn’t lead to any delam issues.
You got me laughing on that one. You are right about the mess and all the sanding. Ben Shipman did several foam swirls with acrylic paint onto foam. He was using Clark and Walker foam blanks. I’ve been talked through the process several times. Ben would use paint straight out of the bottle with out thinning. Pour it on and squeege it. Me …I’ve only done resin swirls…
As far as gloss goes. I’m talking about an extra coat of resin that gets sanded and buffed with a machine so that you get that killer Moonlight glassing finish. Lots of extra work. Many people on Swaylocks spray a gloss finish onto a sanded board. Ask Resinhead
Have you checked out this guy…World famous________www.evolutionsurf.com
Howzit rodH, Don't take gloss and polish jobs to easy. There's a reason they charge at least $50 for it. When working with gloss resin you can mess up the application and then the rub out work is harder. It is very easy to burn through a gloss job and hit the weave when sanding and polishing and then you have to decide if you can live with the burn throughs or regloss the board. plus the sanding is more delicate and you will use at minimum of 3 different grits before going to the rubout stage. I know 1 glasser who hated rubbing out his boards due to bad gloss jobs, I took him aside and showed him how to do his glossing correctly and now he doesn't hats it quite as much. On Kauai a gloss and polish usually starts at aroud $55 and can even cost more.Aloha,Kokua
