i’m going to order pigment from Fiberglass Florida…is there a set ratio you guys use for pinlines, lam’s. etc?? so to prevent bleeding or improper cure times.
Teddy: good question, hoping Kokua or Cleanlines will have some formulas. What has been working ok for me lately is to load up the resin with enough pigment (including white for opaques) so that a piece of white printed newsprint or reprints from Swaylock’s can’t be read through a splotch of my resin mix. Drip it on with your stir stick. Seems that sometimes it takes incredible ammounts of pigment ($$) to get to this point. Test some with catalyst if you are unsure about the ratios to get it to kick. Good luck! Tom S.
What kind of pigments work best? Is it possible to mix water base house paint into the resin or paint it onto the blank before laminating?
Pretty hard to answer that one. To many variables. Which color, which manufacturer, which type of color and what you want it to come out like. With opaques I used to just mix in a guess and then hold up the stir stick to see if it was opaque enough. If it wasn’t I’d mix in a little more. With tints you can try a bit on a piece of scrap foam with scrap glass before you catalyze to get an idea of the finished look. There’s a lot of feel to it. The great ones had it down. Donny Mulhern was awesome. I glassed hundreds and I never really got it like those guys.
In fiberglass products other than surfboards, opaques are used at 1% to 2%, or around a gallon of pigment per drum of resin. Sluggo