I have a problem with some lam resin not curing. When I say not curing, I mean it is in a semi-liquid form and didn’t get any harder in the last 24hours…
Here is how I fucked things up. I wanted to make a board with opaque rails, only the rails, the rest of the board clear.
I lammed the bottom clear, did a cutlap, everything went as usual.
Now, here is what I shouldn’t have tried, but in my mind it made sense when I did it :D. I though that putting a layer of lam resin heavily pigmented and just painting my rails with it, like a panel, would be a good idea, then I would just have to lam the deck, hotcoat and sand. Having the deck lam wraping the rails already colored seemd like a good idea, even if I burn through a little bit, I wouldn’t have to recolor the area as the lam of my deck would protect it…
Now, if everything would have gone smooth, it would have been cool… but the colored resin on my rails doesn’t seem to kick at all… I put a lot of pigment, but also a lot of catalyst. The same mix in the pot kicked and is now hard.
What would you do at this point? The deck is not yet laminated…
A thin layer of hotcoat resin on the rails, then sand it to the weaves and lam the deck then do a resin panel on the rails as I should have done:)?
Put some wax paper over the rails and hope the resin will harden so I can sand it and then lam the deck?
I thought about that Lowel, the problem is that because the resin is taking so long to (or will never) kick, it kind of did the avalanche thing, so if I lam over now, I risk a very poor rail lam with wobbles and things I will pay for later :D. Also, because it didn’t kick, I am sure the pigmented rails are going to bleed into the clear while squeegeeing :(.
Take a hard plastic squeegee to it and pull everything off you can in the way of excess resin. If you didn’t have all the excess resin and pigment to deal with you could lam the deck and the new resin would set off the previous coat of resin. Don’t tell me;;; this is you first glass job ??
You are right Barry. It seems that the new pigment I tried is causing this. Blue oxford color. I have never had this problem but I ran a test on the side a couple of hours ago and it didn’t kick either… The problem is that the pigment is not very strong so you need a lot to get an opaque, and by putting a lot of this pigment, you end up messing the resin…
Anyway, I scraped it off with razor blades and 60 grit to the weaves, will lam the deck tomorrow and do a panel on the rails after hotcoat+ sanding, then gloss.
No tmy first glass job at all but first time I had this problem. The lam under the screw up is sitting tight and was fully cured before this happened so I will just lam the deck as I cleaned the mess out tonight.
Yes then it has to be the pigment. I do opaques, but found that if I add a little white pigment to my batch that it goes opaque with less pigment. While it is true generally that white added to another color yields a pastel. With just a little white I can still get a dark color.
I may try this when I do the panel on the rails Lowell! I might also add a point of black to keep the blue dark, will do a test on the side BEFORE this time hahah!
Laminated the deck this morning and hotcoated it, everything is good now!
