Hopefully I won't get flamed for putting this project in its own thread but I just finished my second board. I am going to write some detail about my process and hopefully I can get some input about some of the problems I encountered. Here is the overall view of the finished board
First of all, I didn't shape it. This project was mostly about doing color work for a personalized board. The board was shaped by Infinity Surf shop so props to Steve. The foam is EPS. All the color work is acrylic paint directly on the foam. I used Blickcrylic paints and dliuted them 50%. I used a Liquitex product designed for thinning acrylic paint. I had two main problems with the painting: lift-offs and bleed-unders. I used mostly the green 233 tape. I tried to seal the tape with clear acrylic media to reduce the bleed-unders. This mostly worked but the tape pulled some of the paint off the board. This close-up shows what happened.
you can see a pretty good line bewteen the yellow and orange but you can also see where the yellow paint pulled off with the tape. You can also see the taped up psuedo-pinline. I actually had more bleed-unders on the black line than elsewhere. I think I did not use enough clear medium to get a good seal on the tape. A general problem I had was marking the foam. A lot of the defects in the color boundaries are where I made little dots to mark the curves. I'd love to get some tip on how to mark the foam without making indents that later lead to bleed-unders. Here is another view of the board being painted.
I used 6 oz E cloth for glassing and RR CE epoxy with slow hardener for everything: lamination, fill coat, and gloss coat. One layer on the bottom and two layers on top. I sanded the fill coat to 220 because at that point I had not decdied to try to polish it. I didn't like the way it looked after sanding to 220 so I put on another layer of epoxy to polish. I started sanding the gloss coat with 320 then 400 then 600 the 800 then 1000 then compound and finally polish. I did all the gloss coat sanding by hand. Having never done anything like trying to polish epoxy before, I think it came out pretty good. here is a shot hopefully showing the polished surface.
I used 3M foam compounding and polishing pads that I got from a car refinishing store and a Mikita polisher. The foam pads were pricey but seemed to work well. The compound and polish I got from Fiberglass Supply. One thing is I could not get the hang of sanding with 8" Power Pads. I did all the fill coat sanding (120 and 220) with a 5" Dewalt random orbit sander. I felt I had much more control with that sander. I guess I just don't have the technique for the Power Pads. Well I guess that its. Now I can muck up the deck with wax :)