Greetings,
I’m been practicing with cheap foam material like home depot foam. Now I have a good board shaped and I want to learn glass but the epoxy it too expensive for practice. Does anyone tried to use car paint to spray the whole board and then use polyester resin. And If so, does anyone use in the water?
Thanks and hope to hear your reply,
Hello Jaime-
It is my experience that solvent-based (containing strong solvents like toluene, acetone, xylene) spray paints and polyester resin will melt EPS foam, and that polyester resin will melt solvent-based spray paint.
If your shaped board is nice, spend the money on epoxy so it does’t melt from the paint or resin and avoid the polyester fumes .
If in doubt, make a test panel with your foam and paint and resin and see what happens.
Like others mentioned, there are water-based paints that do not harm EPS.
My recommendation is, don’t waste your time doing it. Get epoxy.
oil based paint will eat eps, so no spray paints. If you must carry on with your mental illness, then use water based house paint or primer.
Pour some gasoline into a coffee cup…watch what happens
You would have to really, really seal the EPS. Auto paint would not be the proper sealer, and the solvents/vehicles in most auto paints would melt the foam anyway.
For a backyard solution to do something ridiculous like glassing with PE, use elastomeric house paint or Elmer’s Glue to cover the blank.
Mike Daniel is right. It would have to coated really well with no holidays or even pinholes. Contact between foam and resin is to be avoided at all costs.
If Greg Loehr is still around here, he may back me up on this one.
Some of the early experiments with styrofoam type blanks were coated with Elmer’s glue and glassed with PE.
I’m sure I heard talk of this some time in the late 70s or early 80s.
Serious hijack here, but Sammy, you would be correct. Late 70s there wasn’t much for suitable epoxies, but the search for lighter cores led to eps. Attempts were made with “sealants” and 4oz poly glass jobs. Not exactly a durable board…
The available epoxies sucked for a bunch of reasons. This would be where GL stepped in and started compounding epoxies in his garage. Don’t ask me how I know this lol.
See? I’m not so old that the memory is totally shot (yet).
My first take on EPS/epoxy was that an equally strong board could be made lighter using the same amount of glass. Or, that a stronger board could be done that weighed the same as a production PU/PE except the wieght and strength were in the shell, where it does the most good.
Well, I have to wait to spend some money on epoxy. Does someone recomend me use West System epoxy + slow hardner that is the cheap epoxy I faund locally.
Thanks for the all reply,
PD: I dont try and first ask to people that I know have a lot of expert judgment and see what they try.
Three words I’ve never seen used in the same sentence “West System” and “cheap”. Where I come from, West has a reputation for being really expensive. I also know it’s not that great for doing surfboards. Having never used epoxy to glass a board I don’t know if it costs less than Resin Research. But, if I was going to do an epoxy glass job I sure wouldn’t use West, even if it was the cheapest.
West is not advisable for surfboards.
Resin Research is the leader in surfboard epoxies, and they ship all over the world.
Back in the 80’s, when working for Gary Linden,
we glassed a EPS with Polyester resin.
No meltdown.
Here’s how we did it.
Gary told me that Bob Simmons experimented with Styrofoam and Poly resin.
He would coat the board with glue. Multiple coats.
It seled it, but not much.
We took sheets of ricepaper and laminated them with Elmers glue.
We then glassed it normal with Fiberglass and resin.
Board was finished as usual.
Board went on to surf in the first wavepool surf contest somewhere.
Soon after that, we recieved the first sample of extruded poly-styrene foam blanks from Japan.
They where called Cross-Tune blanks.
We glassed those with West System resin.
Kinda yellow in color.
Could have used Pigments to color boards.
This was 1984-1985.
Why not first laminate with epoxy and Cerex (Skins) and then glass with PE over that? Non woven nylon. No pinholes. It’s been done before.
depends on the paint. There are some great options for spray paints you can use directly on the foam for poly glassing
West is a great system for doing work on Boats but it is a heavy epoxy resin and hard to work into fiberglass fabric. I’m currently using West Epoxy G Flex to repair an Old Kayak. Great stuff for its intended use. For a Board, the Resin Research Epoxy would be best. You should be able to buy it on line