I’ve tried searching the archives on this one but with no luck and I am hoping someone might be able to help a brother out.
I have done 2 colored lam jobs to date. The first came out very well, and is completely opaque. The second ended up with more of a translucent feel - you can just make out the stringer, but any imperfections in the foam are not visible. Both of these boards were done with with a single 10.5" box installed after hot-coating.
I am about to do a solid opaque “baby blue” hull lam job and I am using a futures setup. My question relates to the “footballs” required to reinforce the fin boxes. And my concern is this - since I am a newbie to doing the colored lam thing my color job may end up a bit translucent again and look a bit funky around the fin box patches.
Should I:
A. Put the patches down with clear resin and assume they’ll just blend in with the rest of the lam job.
B. Put the patches down with a bit of the colored resin batch, to insure color matching
C. Use either of the above mentioned plans, and do a cut-lap treatment around the patches to insure a consistent shape if there is any see-through effect?
If anyone has any other solutions, or experience with this I’d be in you debt if you could give me a little help. I’ve attached a graphic of what I am attempting to do as reference.
done it numerous times. It boils down to having the boxes show or not.
If you want them to show, then lam the board without boxes, without patches and when you sand the hotcoat, sink the boxes and put a total of 12 ounces of cloth (in staggered patches) using clear resin. Re-hotcoat the tail area and sand smooth with the rest of the bottom.
If you just want fin slits to show then you sink them as part of the lam process. Good idea is to pour off some of your pigmented batch and sink the boxes with this colored resin (never just clear as it could show). Before it gels, lay the patches and roll the bottom cloth back over the area and start lamming. 12 ounces should be covering the boxes. Opaque will not show the patches as long as it is strong.
The problem with the second approach is the chance that you might get bubbles you might not see, so pay attention. Hope this helps…
If your lam batch is truly opaque then you will not ahve to worry about the patches showing through as slightly darker.
However if the lam batch has any amount of transparency then you will see a faint outline where the patches are.
You can do a few things…
A. Lam without patches. Lam the bottom and once cured aply patches with clear resin. Hot coat and smooth as necessary.
B. Use a tail patch. Cut a tail patch to go over entire back 18" or so and lam tail patch with bottom layer together. If the lam batch is a littel transparetn then you will see a slightly darker sectikon where the bottom tail patch is lammed. This actually looks kinda cool. Done on longboards more so than on shorties, but cool nonetheless.
I finaly finished her up. I ended up employing the following method for the fin boxes:
taped off and lamed 1 set of 4 oz. footballs with the colored resin, and then trimmed like a cut lap
lamed the hull as normal with 4 oz. and colored resin
added a 3rd set of 4 oz. patches with clear resin
basted and ground the boxes a bit after doing the deck lam and grinding the laps on the hull.
hot coated as normal and went through the sanding process.
All in all I am pleased with the results. I ended up with a little bit of color inconsistency around the boxes where the differnt layers for glass are exposed. Next time I’ll probably lam the board first and route the box holes afterwards, do 3 football patch layers with clear, baste, grind and hot coat. I figure it’d loook better to see the entire boxe flange. I have a series of images up from plans at the bottom to the finished product at top. Please take a look if you’re interested:
