hotcoat questions-help

General Discussion
1

howdy,

i just finished searching the forums and i found some information but nothing specific to my question. please help.

i have been fixing my own dings since i started surfing 6 years ago. never had one “professionally” repaired. i learned myself, nobody showed me. i learned by buying those ding all repair kits and just copying their instructions, and eventually started buying my own resin and glass in larger quantities and bought a real sander to speed it up.

when surfing with my friend the other day, she was taking me through the glassing process because she used to be a glasser. we were talking about a hotcoat, which i know exisits but never really paid any attention to. ive never hot coated any of my dings, ever. the ding all repair kit has no hot coat in it, so i figured when i finished the steps from the kit, i was done.

she said its amazing that my boards havent become waterlogged, and it was probably because of the large amount of resin i use when fixing dings. which is correct.

i just finished a huge job on one of the tails of my boards and i want to ride it. but now im nervous to do so without a hotcoat. where do i get hotcoat? i know its some sort of wax and something else mixed in with resin. also, its a pointblanks board, so how is theprocess different from a regular board? i found various opinions in the forums.

what do i do? i need hotcoat.

thanks in advance,

bobby

2

It just depends whether you’re using polyester or epoxy resin. Since you mention a pointblank board (Patagonia?) I assume you’re talking about epoxy since these boards have a polystyrene core which is compatible only with epoxy resin. (Styrene contained in polyester resin will melt polystyrene foam).

A hot-coat with epoxy resin is just a coat of standard epoxy that you brush on top of your laminating coat to fill the glass weave. It’s then sanded to a smooth finish.

A hot-coat with polyester resin is laminating resin in which you add what’s called wax in styrene. This is because polyester resin will stay sticky if you don’t add this, and you wouldn’t be able to sand it. Wax in styrene works like this: wax, being lighter than resin, raises to the surface of resin and isolates it from air, thus allowing the resin to cure totally and making it sandable.

My thought is that you’ve been actually hot-coating without knowing you were… (Since you say you used lots of resin on top of your repairs…)

3

thanks balsa, i appreciate it. that was the perfect response.