Hey folks
I am about to glass my first board using epoxy and I was curious if any of the BASIC methods or techniques Brucker uses translate well when working with epoxy? For example the cross stroke method when hot coating etc…
I have a pretty good understanding of both materials and methods, just looking for something extra or something I may have missed that might help before I start.
I found that his techniques worked very well with epoxy. I don’t think I could have glassed my board without watching it. The one thing that I would recommend is that you move really slowly. For example, when you walk out the hot and gloss coat go half as slow as he did (at least for me, it greatly reduced the number of bubbles). I did not find that the brand of tape was important with epoxy. The cheap tape did as good a job as the quality tape.
try not to spread your resin around as much as you would with poly. epoxy soaks through your glass a little better. if you move around epoxy to much it will get frothy.
also make sure you stir really really well and use exact measurements.
either then that the methods of glassing are about the same, and epoxy is so much nicer to work with.
All of the techniques I used seem to work fine with epoxy.The guys are right about using less resin and moving slower in the hotcoat stage.We have used Resin Research resin on both Polyurethane Blanks and EPS with great results.On EPS blanks I like the hard “throwaway” squegees better.On polyurethane I used the Thalco softer blue sgueegee.When Greg developed additive “F” it was like night and day…waaaaay better.Styrene is what eats masking tape and since epoxy is not as hot a resin I guess you could cheat on tape but to me it’s not worth it.I have never glossed a board laminated with epoxy.The ones we did were sanded finish with resin research water based spray finish.I have heard of epoxy boards being glossed with poly resin but I have no experience in this matter.Maybe Greg will jump in on the pros and cons of doing this.I have done resin pins on a sanded epoxy hotcoat and they worked fine.Most guys use acrylics or pens nowadays I guess.Actually I have a question for you epoxy gurus…can you use normal pigments and tints with epoxy or do you use another formulation?I heard it didn’t matter???Sounds like a lot of people have that video I did for Damascus.I don’t even remember what was on it.I had one copy and lent it out never to be seen again. RB
i used standard pigment on my last epoxy lam and it went great.
I would jump in but… you guys have it covered. I haven’t found any tints or opaques that won’t work with epoxy. If you have a question about any one just do a small test batch to be sure.
The only real differences to me are with epoxy letting the resin soak in insead of pushing it in like with poly and using a stiffer sqeegee. Things are real similar other than that.