If you’re wondering about the title to this thread, read this one first.
The board is a 6’5" shorty for a friend of mine who let me do whatever I wanted with the design and color. Again, I used Resin Research CE epoxy and my room temp was about 70 degrees F at the time of wetout, creeping up to 80 degrees F throughout the cure.
After the lessons learned in the last thread, this is how it all went down.
I mixed up a total of 27 oz. of resin for the bottom lamination. Yes, this is not very cost effective, but it’s the only way I know how to do it to get the desired look - and I love epoxy. So I mixed up 21 oz. of white and 6 oz. of black. I wanted to do two separate swirls, so I took a clean cup, and threw 12 oz. of white in it. Then I added 3 oz. of black in a spiral pattern. I didn’t want colors to blend, so I quickly got it on the board. I swirled the first batch in the middle and started working my way out around the center. When the cup was out, I went and dumped the rest of the black (3 more oz.) into the rest of the white (9 oz.) using the same spiral pattern as the first time (notice the ratio - I wanted it to be darker on the rails). I dumped it on the board using the same swirling technique, working my way out toward the rail. I then tried to squeegee the puddled resin in a swirling motion, but gained little extra coloring doing it this way.
Lessons Learned
1. Prepare. This time, I had no help mixing. I knew I was going to have to move fast and efficiently having mixed epoxy sitting while I mixed more. Before I pulled out any liquids, I double and triple checked everything. I had multiple stir sticks ready, all the mixing cups lined up, squeegee readily available, all the pigment, resin, hardener, and additive F in easy to reach/easy to put away locations so I could jam.
2. Take care dumping one color into another. I was pretty concerned to get my ratios right this time. So concerned, that as I was dumping the black into the white on the first go, I was paying too close attention to hitting my 15 oz. mark, that I didn’t notice that all the black was puddling on top of the white all the way around the cup. You’ll notice in the pictures that there is a big dark spot right in the middle. That’s where the puddled black on top of the white hit the foam first.
**3. Be careful not to lose your cutlap line. **It seems every time I do a cutlap in color, the rails get a little thin with resin. This time I decided to try something I hadn’t tried before. Where the grey got a little light, I used a 3" chip brush, dipped it in some extra resin that came off the bottom, and painted on a little more to thicken it up and make the color more consistent. It worked fine, but in some spots, I totally lost my tape line for the cutlap. When I cut it off a few hours later, there were a couple spots that were off by 1/8" or so. Looks like I’m putting a 1/4" pinline down!
**4. Don’t make a mess. **With all that extra resin, there’s a lot of waste. I don’t use a tray to catch the extra, so I chose to step right in it and track it all over the shop. This doesn’t usually happen to me since I’ve got my quantities and skils down a little better since using clear epoxy.
**5. Still not sure about heating epoxy. ** On the first thread, I talked about heating up the resin too much and the colors blended too fast since they were very viscous. One person replied stating they had good luck heating the base color slightly and keeping the accent color cool. I was going to try it, but I didn’t. Rather, this time I mixed both colors cool. I’m not sure if it was my application, the chosen colors, or something else, but it seemed to work better than heating the colors up.
All in all, I really liked the way it turned out. There are a couple things I’ll do different next time, but mostly I’ll be careful with what hits the foam first. I’d rather that black hole not be there. At any rate, thanks for checking it out.
Oh, and don’t give me crap about my dusty glassing bay. I know…
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