It was posted here a while back (Halcyon? others?) about hot coating epoxy while the lam was still gummy which produced better coverage of the weave. My question is what about taping to keep the drips off of the bottom? Can you still tape? Does it matter? I was going to try this method this weekend. thx
Don’t tape. Just let the drips hang and take down the drips and the lap before hot coating the bottom.
Another way is to let your laminate kick, then when you hot coat the deck start with the bottom side up and paste your laps and fin box area. You can actually do this when the deck is still fairly green. Just be sure you have plastic on the racks so your green laminate doesn’t stick. Flip that while the paste is still wet (same batch of resin) and hot coat the deck letting it meet the paste job. Then when you flip the board and sand the bottom lap and finbox area you hit almost no glass. Then hot coat the bottom taped high onto the deck. Makes for two layers of hot coat on the rail for extra sanding room… no cloth show. Additive F makes for good adheision between all the layers. This is an old sailboard trick reintroduced by Steve Forstall.
Great advice. thx
Greg
When you say paste the laps, do you add silica to thicken the resin? if not what do you mean? I have a board in the bag at the moment, this could be of some use!!!
thanks
Mark
i do a version of what greg was saying. i let the top lam kick then i flip the boad but i cover the tape on the racks with strips of rice paper. then do my patches over my future boxes, paint about 2" around the board to cover the lap, and then flip and hotcoat the top… another variation i do, if i am going for a sanded finish and not g/p. is before painting around the lap i squeege a thin layer over the whole bottom, actually it is not even a thin layer i press hard so it basically just looks wet, then i paint around the laps and the rails, let kick, flip and then do the squeege thing to the top, let it kick and then hotcoat the top… i find that when i do the squeege trick i can get almost no pin holes, it is almost like a double hotcoat…
some really great tips on this thread…
just realized that i need to get some fast harderner for hotcoats…
thanks gents!
I was thinking the same thing!
By paste I just mean painting resin on the lap. One thing that we’ve always had to deal with is some pin air in the lap. Sanding a regular hot coat and then spray finishing always left a bit of this exposed. So sanding the lap before your bottom hot coat pops all those bubbles so the bottom hot coat can fill them in. By pasting the lap my presand on the bottom lap comes out a bit cleaner.
yah i sand the laps also… pretty high stress the first few times you do it…use your disk and a hard pad, i go for a smaller pad about 4 1/2" around… made it by glueing a piece of 1/4" ply to the bottom of an old pad. then i glued a sheet of 50grit to the floor. then i turned on the sander and held the edge of the pad/wood to the sand paper. perfect circle kinda fun to make…