Okay after screwing up the bottom lamination on my longboard I had much much better results on the deck. The frothing issue was giving me heart attacks and on the deck the soloution was right in front of my face. After mixing my epoxy with a paint stick i was about to grab my roller paint brush and plastic spreader that i had just bought to see which one would work best…then it occured to me why not try the paint stick. Well the paint stick worked really well in spreading the epoxy over large areas with no frothing and just a few bubbles. It was like spreading frosting on a giant cake and moved lots of it well. I even used it to pull the epoxy out to the laps and smear it on the laps. The other thing was laminating when it was cool gave alot more worktime to wet the laps and make sure i got all the bubbles and pull the cloth tight.
pay attention to your working temp. mine was too high in the daytime heat in a small room in Hawaii was too hot. Probably in the upper 80F only gave 20min before it was unworkable.
Oh yeah, never airbrush your board a dark color when your trying something new cause your going to see every F Up clearly. Now i have to figure out how im going to hide all my screwups on my lap.
Don’t cover with a wide color band…looks like a Surftech or garage job.
Instead, add 3 pinstripes separated by 1/8th ", using narrow pinstripe tape from auto body or art supply store. At such narrow separation, it’s hard to see the wavy laps. Of course, you still have to sand the hotcoat right there with 320, then start the first stripe with regular 3/4 brown masking tape and TLC.
No its a freelap with a few dry spots and bubbles and a few spots where the red paint bled. Oh yeah another thing to remember never ever use cheap paint.
it goes crazy on red and you just wanna keep looking at it …its like you just cant focus or something but you keep trying ,its one of those mesmerising combinations…
I glassed a board in epoxy this weekend too. The problem I ran into was - I left some resin in the bucket to wet out the laps and set it down to carefully and slowly (since it takes a long time for epoxy to start thickening) work the flats to get a even resin tint (light blue). Then I picked up my bucket to wet out the laps - holy smoking resin batman! Got the thick hot stuff on the best I could but I could not saturate the whole lap (fairly wide cut lap). No worries - I just mixed up a small batch of blue/grey and brushed it on the dry fiberglass, so the board (supposed to be solid light blue) is a light blue bottom with lightblue and darkblue/grey ‘striped’ rails. Looks sweet. Will look even better with a pinline.
When I dump all the resin on the board at once, it is tough to get the extra back out onto the rails, but if I leave what I need for the rails in the bucket, it starts smoking…Trying to find the happy medium.
By the way, despite the set backs in a new learning curve - I love the epoxy. No stink, stronger/lighter boards, and easier to get a nice even tight lamination. and oh yea I am using polyurethane blanks w/ Resin Research. A little creeped out by the sensitation thread, but I trust that Greg Loehr states that they have only had a problem when associated with contaminated acetone, which has been replaced by denatured alcohol and GoJo.
Yup i had the same problems but i had a temperature issue also probably in the high 80s low 90s in a small room in the mid day heat in Hawaii. 20min the stuff was getting real thick and shortly became unworkable. i left puddles on the bottom lam that was a nightmare to sand flat, left dry spots on the rail that i can still see and many small bubbles. On the bright side the deck came out nice since i started using a paintstick the spread the epoxy. Now I just have to figure out how to get the glass nice and flat and get the hotcoat to not show the weave especially on the rails. Epoxy hotcoats dont seem to want to fill the imperfections as well for some reason.
I have done 2 epoxy glass jobs now and the epoxy is thinner so the hotcoat seems to just barely cover the weave, but it seems to fill in the lowspots and drain off the high spots better than poly, giving a much smoother finish which requires less sanding.