i started a board that i’d wanted for a couple of years, and tried to foam stain the whole thing yellow. in hindsight, this was a very bad idea. what i ended up with was like a bad hotcoat on the foam. this is also my first attempt at using epoxy. now there is orange peel, bugs, holes, drips and patchy spots.
my thoughts on fixing it- sand high spots, fill in holes with yellow epoxy. lam.
would it help cover up the mistakes if i tinted the lam too? the yellow i’ve got on there is like a mango-lemon color. go darker? lighter?
I am assuming that it’s just a foam stained blank at this point with no lam coat on. Pictures would help. You have several options:
you can lightly sand the foam stain and do an acid splash with different colors them glass over it.
you can do an acid splash with the lam coat.
you can lam coat using pigment. (If you add white pigment with the yellow color, this will cover most of the flaws.)
you can combine these techniques.
These are just my ideas. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Most importantly, learn from your mistakes, (we all make them) and read the threads. Look up “foam staining”.
thanks for the advice. i think i’ll fill the little holes and then try tinting the lam with white. yeah, its just foam with epoxy on it.
some of the epoxy is kinda wavy from touching it too late into polymerization. will that disappear under the glass, or should i try to get that smooth before laminating?
Wavy: You might want to sand it down a bit. It’s really important to squeegee the excess colored epoxy/resin off when foam staining. Using white/color mix will hide most of the flaws. Don’t worry too much about it. My latest red epoxy foam stain generated uneven color results. That’s why I am sticking to yellows, white based colors or acid splashes and swirls. I’ll post my latest foam stain at the end of the week.
I would advise to do some kind of mix color acid splash like they said… trying to get one solid color out of that will be real hard, i had this happen to me before. It took several lam layers on top of eachother to get an almost solid white out of the board… better off with the splash
Whether or not you’ll get the foam stain completely washed out with white really depends on how many cloth layers you’re going to use. I had a similar horrible experience (with a deep blue, though).
I ran out of microballoons/microspheres to seal the blank with, and used talc as a substitute. Bad idea, looked like dilute bile. So, I tried covering it with a deep blue pigmented epoxy coat that fish-eyed on me like no other, so I sanded down the high spots/bumps and lammed 6x6x6 top and 6x6 bottom with white pigment. Came out great!
Here are pics of the board, a 48" paipo, before I added fins: Sorry, don’t have any before pics. It was a stringerless, so I was going to glass it heavy anyway, but I’m glad at how it turned out…
I had a friend who had the same situation, and did a resin swirl in the lam and it turned out great. You can even do a sort of resin swirl in a heavy hotcoat, pulling the resin around with a paintbrush. I’ve seen that done, too… pretty trippy results. Either will work if you’re not after any particular look and/or content with something unusual.