I have just completed my 3rd board, so am iam still on a steep learning curve, but i have come up with a very soft finish on the end product. I cannot figure out for the life of me what i have done differnet from my first two, which turned out fine or at least in respect to a hard glass finish anyway.
Has anyone come up agauinst this problem before?
You might want to restart this thread in general as this is the wrong section of the forum and no one will see it.
I moved it for ya… what exactly do you mean by “soft finish” - the deck is mushy? the resin is sticky?
A similar thing happened to me but on a single board, the deck is fine, but the bottom is “soft.” Before I put a final hot coat on my first board I wiped it down with acetone. I was working indoors and apparently the acetone didn’t fully evaporate from the bottom before I did the hotcoat, so the hotcoat never fully cured. Its not what i woudl call sticky, but months later, I can still make a mark in the glass (resin research epoxy) with my fingernail. when I try to sand it the hotcoat sort of gums up the sanding pad, but doesn’t really do much. If that is what you’ve got, you might want to search the archives for info about the pitfalls of using acetone… or maybe not, because it won’t be all that encouraging. Basically the advice I have seen is to stay away from it and stick with denatured alcohol.
I live in a small apartment in NYC, so I can only work on my board at my parents house in pennsylvania. I’m going to try doing another hotcoat to see if that hels the original hotcoat to cure, but it will likely be months before I go for a visit, so don’t wait around to hear if it worked.
good luck.
Thanks for the advice Clar as you can see i am a ‘Newbie’
Cheers Keith.
What i mean by a soft finish is that you can easily put little pressure dings on the board when you give it a little squeeze. It is not mushy or the resin is not sticky but it is hard enough to make me want to surf it but i have a feeling it will not last long.
I used sun cure resin and i was thinking that maybe we didn’t add enough of it to the 20 litre drum of resin but my mate did a board with the same resin and it turned out fine. The only thing i did differently, as far as i can tell, is finished it with a product called Seal Skin form Shapers Australia.
I have another board on the go at the moment so its no drama but i was curious if anyone has come across this problem.
Onya
MAtt
what foam blank are you using. many blanks are only hard near the skin or crust. so if you have shaped a lot of thickness out of the bottom the foam may be soft.
It may just need to fully cure. Give it some time in a warm place - and I mean weeks, unless you’re planning on doing a post cure. Certainly don’t ride it yet. If you used minimal resin in your lam, and you’re friend used more than necessary, they will cure differently in terms of how hard they feel.
The other obvious thing would be the hardness of the foam under the lam, as already stated.
Cheers Matt!
I think others have provided the correct answers - not fully cured or softer foam, as it seems unlikely that a sealant would do that - but if you let it cure longer and its still softer than you like, you might consider an additional layer of glass over critical portions of it (stomp patch for the deck etc). Unless you’d rather have it light than durable… it does of course give you a great excuse to make your next board sooner!! Sounds like you’re already doing that though…