Started glassing #2 today, went quite better than #1, but still not even close to a “nice job.” Glassing truly is the art of the process.
Anyhow, my original intention was to do an opaque pigment, cream color. Mixed 3 parts white to 1 part yellow (oxide?) to about a teaspoon and added it to a quart of resin. According to the archives it was more than enough pigment. Looked great when I was straining and mixing.
Once I was laminating i found out different. Definitely wasn’t opaque, it was more of a tint and came it looking like the board had already lay in the sun for a while. Kinda bummed out. Trial and error is the way I guess…
I’ve heard no more than 2 teaspoons to a quart so maybe I should have used 2 teaspoons? Is there a different rule for white?
Archives say yes and no to adding pigment to a hotcoat. What do most professional glassers do?
to qualify, i’m definitely not a pro, but i wouldn’t think pigmenting a hot coat would be a good idea. it would be impossible to sand evenly, & you’d get imperfections & uneven colour coverage.
if you really dislike it, spray the board with acrylic, then fillercoat, sand carefully, & gloss. that’d give you an even opaque look.
but i’m sure others out there might have better ideas.
lay on a thin, but much more heavily pigmented hotcoat. assuming it comes out relatively even, lay down another thin clearcoat over top and sand that, trying not to cut into the pigmented hotcoat.
do some sort of abstract/drizzle over the lam, and then hotcoat clear and sand. black and white with either blue and green or red could look pretty nifty.
and next time, do a test patch on some scrap foam and glass after mixing your pigment/tint. if the color looks right when it’s in the bucket, you still need to add a lot more.
On my first board I decided to try this. I figured cuting the laps with pigment wasn’t going to happen. I used green as a base and sanded it down. Areas that got real thin or I sanded through, I later spread on some yellow and resanded.
“yea, I meant to do that”…exactly. The thing looked like a 10 ft half ripe cucumber when I was done. We called it the giant pickle. My dad really liked it, but that doesn’t say much. Besides, I think he was just trying to making me feel good.
primary problem to pigmenting in the sanding coat would be matching the color of the sanding coat to the color of the laminating coat.
some suppliers will sell you tint and tell you it is pigment, because that is what their distributors/manufacturers tell them. this may be what happened here.
however, i have seen this problem only with green, not yellow.
anyhow, i’m not a pro, but while you are waiting for them to respond…anything you do with more resin is going to yield a heavier board. that is…even a reglass with 4oz and 1 or 2 oz yellow to a quart of resin is going to yield a heavier board. 1 and possibly 2 sanding coats, in yellow, (if you choose not to reglass) also will yield a heavier board.
as suggested, you may be able to paint and put sanding coat over that, and get away with it without adding substantial weight. krylon makes a special paint for plastics in a rattle can, which i have not found to run when a clear sanding coat is put over it. suggest you try a sample run before relying on what i say, tho.
Several boards have come out of our shop with pigmented hotcoats… all of them “resin swirls.” They don’t look bad at all. You’re going to put a hotcoat on it anyway, so why not pigment it? No extra weight at all.
Pick some colors that would look good with that sun-yellowed cream color you ended up with, and gently stir them into your hotcoat resin. Pour it out in long, eve, nose-to-tail streams, then spread it out with a paintbrush, again, using long nose-to-tail strokes. Don’t push it around too much… just enough to get it covered evenly, and walk away.
We’ve gotten some great results using shades of blue and white… looks like flowing water. But we’ve also done red/oranange/yellow/green, and blue/grey/white.
Went out this morning to sand the laps and lam the deck. Looks like there were some definite bonding issues that came up overnight - there were several large, colorless bubbles in the rails, all which i cut out. Something about the lam just doesn’t feel “right,” and i think it may have something to do with the pigment.
I had a similar question regarding pigmint/tint in the gloss coat. I have an old diamond tail diff that I was going to restore. However, I was going to try to avoid having to sand all the way down to the lam coat. I wanted to just fix all the dings, fair in the glass, and gloss it with some tint or pigment in the resin. Will I “F” the whole thing up if I do that?
You will see the color of the board underneath the hotcoat through the hotcoat. That’s why you gotta use colors that match.
When I restore old boards… really old boards… I just fix the dings, rough sand the whole thing, and clear hotcoat. I like to see the battle scars.
Although I’m fixing a snapped longboard now, a relatively new one, and I’m doing some artwork over the whole re-glassed surface with paint, then I’ll clear hotcoat over that.
