I just wanted to jot down my experiences with RR Kwik Kick Epoxy. I have been reading Swaylocks to get a wealth of information and find it extremely valuable, here is may attempt to try and give some back. I am not a “friend of Greg’s” or anything like that this is just my own experiences. Keep in mind that your results may be different as these are just anecdotal. We have a fairly moist and cool climate up here in Western Oregon and I do most of my shaping in the winter and evenings, slipping in a glassing session whenever the temp outside gets above 50 deg. F. I say this because the experiences of someone working in dry warm weather may be very different in some cases.
I started experimenting with epoxy for several reasons, the main one being after a poly glassing job in the garage the whole house smelled toxic and I would have to stay at the GFs house for a few days while it cleared out. I ended up taping off the door to the garage which helped considerably. Anyway, I fancy myself an environmentalist to some degree and wanted to try something less harmful to everyone’s health, chiefly my own. I was tired of repairing my boards constantly, and was looking for something more ding resistant than poly. I suppose I am clumsy and hit a lot of rocks, but hey sometimes that’s where the best surf is, and after all, it’s Oregon and there are a lot of jagged rocks around here. I also found a good source for low cost shipping through Pau Hanna for EPS blanks. Shipping is a real killer if you don’t have a blank distributor in your state. The key with Pau Hanna is to give them a call. They can get stuff that is not in their catalog and the site does not always calculate shipping right so you get a person on the line and they hook you up, but I digress.
Here are a few things I found using the stuff:
1. Laminate coats go on just fine above 50 deg F. I don’t even turn on a heater.
2. Gloss and Hot coats will flow too much before they set in the 50s. You want them to flow out but not so much that they leave what looks like mini avalanches descending from the high points of the board. The minimum temp seems to be somewhere in the mid to high 60s. One might argue that I am putting too much on. To that I would counter that when I have gone less, I end up with dry spots and the overall flow out doesn’t seem to work right. See the next point.
3. I use more resin for my hot and gloss coats than recommended. The recommendation is a little more than 1-ounce of resin for each foot of board length. I just did a 10-ft long board that was 24-inches wide and I used 24-ounces of resin. So, yes it’s a big wide board but that is a fair bit more than recommended. I tried going with 15-ounces of resin on the first hot coat and it was like painting it on, there was not enough for flow out or full coverage.
4. Using RR KK on polyester blank seemed like the best of both worlds. No need for sealing, easy to shape, nice weight (I used the green US Blank). I picked a couple of these up on a road trip to O.C. and drove them back in the rain and snow without a cover. After they dried out in the garage for a few weeks they were good to go. They actually did not seem to absorb much water during the trip
5. EPS has its advantages for sure. It can make a very light board. You can recycle the scraps. I sealed it with the distilled water and Fast and Final, seemed to work great.
6. Color work in the laminate coat was a breeze. Not much mixing for resin swirl acid splash kind of stuff. I mixed the pigment into the hardener first. You can mix extra this way and set it aside for an exact color match in the next laminate. I used the regular pigments made for poly or epoxy resins from Fiberglass supply.
7. This is a great source for information on RR KK: http://www.seabase.eu/docs/resin-research-epoxy-usage/
8. Hot and gloss coats are easiest first spread out with the squeegee then the brush.
9. I have never been able to sand the hot coat without hitting the cloth and needing a gloss coat. This is surely operator error, at least in part. I have tried to dress only the sand through areas and then taper the dry resin to blend it to no avail. It is too hard to get it to taper and look right. I ended up saving using a gloss coat anyway and would have saved a lot of time going straight to that instead of hitting this spot and that spot.
10. I kept my Additive F in the cool garage and the solids separated. I later read this was a bad idea and I should have kept it warm. Now I warm it before use to try and get the solids into solution. Last time I tried to strain it too with some success.
11. Fin boxes worked fine without melting the EPS blanks (no problem for polyurethane either). I have used 10.5” boxes, FCS plugs, and ProBox. ProBoxes are my favorite for a thruster or side bite. The little bit of fin adjustability is helpful to get it just right and they are easier to install than the FCS plus because the angle is already right. They install quite a bit like a single fin box with the router template.
12. I learned the hard way that if you totally botch a part of your board you can go to a hardware store and buy an EPS pad sold for under the water heater, the density is about right. Glue it in with epoxy and you are right back in action. Use some creative pin lining to cover up the glue lines.
13. Pin lines were done with acrylic paint. Some paints bled and some did not. I can’t give details right now but I am personally avoiding painted pin lines until I work out what works and what doesn’t.
14. Ding resistance and especially shatter resistance seems to be better than my polyester boards. Last winter one of my board got away from me in the wind while loading board on the car. The nose hit the concrete hard and it just scraped the surface of the epoxy. I believe my polyester board would have shattered the impact area under that impact.