any advice on getting a nice uniform color when using purple tint ?
Time & Practice. But first if you use even presure, and don’t let the resin puddle up you might get good results. Also you need to sand the blank to a finer grit, no drywall lines in the foam. Also if you have any foam blow out holes you need to fill them with a little spackle. Any spots where the resin will sit deeper will show up in a dark dot spot. In a last ditch attempt to make an even purple job, use a drop or two of white pigment, this will opaque out the resin job just a little bit, but leave it see through enough to sufice. If it’s your first attempt at a dark tint, or you haven’t done a bunch of lamination jobs, get ready for a boltchy mess.
-Jay
Don’t get cosmic masturbating, you’ll grow hair on your head.
The PROS can’t do purple well, so start with an easier color.
Even the boards that start on out looking OK tend to fade into a blotchy mess.
That’s why you don’t see many purple surfboards or windsurfboards.
Try yellow for #1
precisely what i was going to suggest. the only time i ever see purple is when it’s a swirl…so uniformity isn’t an issue.
Aside the obvious points about have a nicely finished blank, here’s how I’ve learned to get your best results with any color, even hard colors:
Mix the color in a smaller cup in strong concentration (enough tint for the whole batch, but in about 5oz of resin)
Put a little clear in the main bucket before adding the color concentrated batch. Don’t ever pour color straight into a dry bucket. Strain the color batch in through a fine cone strainer, not the cheap ones.
Mix a lot of resin and make it kinda dark. A too weak purple will look worse than Courtney Love first thing in the morning. Add cobalt to taste.
Set aside about 10 or 12 ounces of the color batch to backfill the side. This will help immensely.
Use an acetone-soaked rubber thalco squeegee with the edge sanded down enough for flexibility, so it conforms to the contours of the blank without undue pressure.
Again, use lots of resin. Sorry but this really helps.
First, wet the whole bottom and laps out completely. Spend some time saturating the whole bottom. Evenly saturating the foam will make the side much more even. Tints get about half of their color from staining the foam, not just getting color in the glass.
Make sure the laps are very wet, and not at all tacky when turning them. Your flexible squeegee will wrap around the lap without excess pressure getting your rails more evenly colored.
Work from the bottom, center out and down the rails with the squeegee, angling the squeegee like you’re cleaning a window. Going back will leave a seam/streak. Continue this technique right off the lap and onto the masking. Clean the squeegee with your wet hand between passes.
Don’t press too hard on the laps, as you will dry the laps out leaving that nice checkerboard pinhole effect…lovely.
Once it has gelled, take a large bondo spreader and your small reserve batch of color, add some styrene to it and, starting from the center, without going back again, backfill the whole bottom, around the rails and off onto the masking again. This will even it up quite a bit. Shoot the fill batch fairly hot. At 85F, for about 10oz of resin, we’re shooting the fill batches at 8 or 10cc. That doesn’t leave you too much time.
By the time your fillcoat is off enough to flip, you laps should be ready to trim, if they gelled right after you were done, which they always are, right 
I’m no expert, but I’ve dont some really nice sides like this, even in colors like grey/green/blue/purple. Take what works, throw out what doesn’t.
Hope this helps.
fillcoat,has anyone else had luck with this??
The fill coat idea sounds intruiging.
My advice if you really love purple, would be to spray the blank the intended color purple, and then instead of a really dark tint, you can then use a very tranparent blueish tint to go over the sprayed blank. This will add the appearacne of a tinted purple lay-up without the difficulty. If you do this just mix in a very small amount of blue, when laminated over the purple it will make it a little darker, deeper, and richer purple and give it the glowing appearance of a true resin tint.
If you really want to learn though the only way is to do it. Take a new blank, and skin it and shape a rail, sand it smooth and then have at it. You won’t be ruining the blank cause it’s not to thickness and you can just pullm the cloth off and plane off the mess.
Problem is is that you will be using a lot of resin to practice with but that the price you pay for gaining experience.
When doing color tints I have foulnd that it really is all about squeegee technique. The window washing analogy is a good one. Don’t let the resin pool up anywhere and be constantly spreading in a smooth uniform, but very controlled motions.
The darker your tint the harder it is to get even color. Purple, dark blues, darker greens, rather difficult. But the trick above should produce a nice looking board without the trouble.
Good luck
Drew
Quote:
...will look worse than Courtney Love first thing in the morning.
Best laugh on Swaylocks in a month 
Nope, won’t look good, unless you want a 3D effect that is spotchy, fades unevenly, and looks homemade trying to salvage a botched color job.
C’mon guys, the best glassers, like Moonlight, can do a serviceable job with medium dark purple. The color jobs starts to fade in one month, looks blotchy after a year.
They are the best glassers who have glassed over 25,000 boards.
Your tips are good for normal glassing, not tint glassing of purple.
Try it if you want, I don’t care if you botch the color job, the board still works.
But maybe someone who’s glassed more than 50 boards might chime in, I’d believe them a little more.
I talk to Haut and Pearson sometimes, and they say “no purple, unless you want the responsibility of the wierd looking finish color”.
Sandthrus, pinbubbles while curing, lap lines, every flaw in the blank, will come thru with even PERFECT lamination technique. Filling the flaws only lightens the color right there.
Hey Rider, good advice from Drew and Bam.
The pressure and evenness of your squeegee is important. How your hand spreads the pressure evenly over the working edge depends on what type and size of squeegee you want to use.
I know it will take many boards before you feel confident, especially doing rails, but learn on a scrap how hard you can push resin, cloth and foam together. Learn how strong the foam is under the pressure, feel how hard you need to push to take too much resin out of the cloth. Learn to see what it looks like to.
You don’t need to do big tests, just enought to give you an idea. The closer you get to minimum resin with maximum pressure and perfectly saturated, the better the strength to weight ratio.
Leave too much resin and your cloth floats, take too much out and it’s ‘dry’. As long as you can get it evenly somewhere in between, for your first tinted board, you will be doing okay.
You’ll get plenty of encouragement here anyway.
I am not so sure that the method I described would not produce a decent result. Have you ever tried this method Lee? While I agree that purple is difficult, I was providing an option to get the color that he wants with a lot less hassle. I admit that I have yet to try this method myself, but in theory it seems to have a lot of merit.
I think that everyone here would agree that airbrushing a blank to a unifor color purple is within the realm of any one who has a profficeincy with a sprayer. My thoughts of glassing over that with a VERY transparent blue lam would achive the desired affect of a tinted purple board.
If you have ever tried this then I would cetainly accept your opinion as very valid but if not then I think the jury should still be in deliberation.
It has raised my curiosity to say the least. I sense an experiment in the works.
Drew
I’ve never done one, and after reading LeeDDs advice, I’d probably not use purple. Unless perhaps you do an acid splash, and live with the randomness of it.
Life’s short, make a descision, get into it, move forward. You want to ride that new board no matter what it looks like, don’t you?
Purple and blue are difficult colors.Fading,blotches and they get hot in the sun.I saw some “unamed” high end boards in a Surf Shop that were done in light blue tint.The shop had taped a paper info. and price sheet on to the board but when it was removed the tints on the board had faded leaving a big square dark mark where the label had blocked the light.And this was inside a building with no direct sunlight.I would do the acid splash like Gene Cooper Does.Pigments have changed over the years…enviromental issues have changed the formulas. RB
While I"m not the most experience glasser around, I have glassed over 120 boards myself, about 50 more for a shop, and casually watched over 400 other boards being glassed or colored.
Our original glasser was RalphEhni, the guy who made Local Motion FAMOUS for it’s crazy, high end color jobs, all acrylic spray. He came straight to LM after moving from SanFrancisco, where he worked at our shop.
I can glass pretty much 95% close to perfect usually, have glassed a bunch of boards where the lam was so good it only needed a hot and was finished looking. No pits, no lap lines (and I use cutlaps), very little weave showing.
Purple is a color I have tackled about 10 times, never any good compared to reds, yellows, greens, or light blues (LB’s get white pig, as do greens).
Since I’ve ordered over 250 boards from Haut, I get to hang around and watch a bit. They HATE purple, and his glasser has glassed over 15,000 boards! They HATE purple.
My association with BobPearson is solely thru one of his reps, and having seen over 50 of his boards being made, I can safely say…“his purples suck, he hates to do it, and asks the customer to choose some different color”.
If you want purple, go for it! I’m just saying it can’t be done well.
That doesn’t mean you should not try!
Go for it.
I gotta chime in on this, having just attempted a gray board which taught me several things: one, I’m not as good as I thought I might be; two, my surform is really dull and tears foam rather than cuts, leaving marks the lam showed me very well; the blank had all kinds of little imperfections, and more. This board will get a swirl finish coat to hide my attempts, and I think in the end it’ll look okay, but what a learning ramp I hit!
NEXT TIME… I’ll use acrylic and sponge it on. Really. Literally. Spray makes so much waste. I use Future in my paint too, seems to help.
I think acrylic purple applied to the foam, however you do it, would be the way to go, if only because it gives you time to second and third coat, and work the thin areas till you get it even.
…spackle and dark tints dont go well!..
Oh yeah another point about squeegee technique and getting the color even: It doesn’t really work to try to even everything out by squeegeeing all the resin off the top of the lam. Rather, once the cloth is down tight againt the foam (NOT FLOATING), leave the top nice and wet, and the side will sort of self-level, evening out the color a little. Make sense?
Howzit reverb, Spackle doesn't work well with paint either. The trick is to spray white paint over the spackle before painting. I think if you wanted to do a tint over spackle, what may work is to spray the whole board with white paint before using tint. I can't say for sure if it will work since I've never tried it but it could be the answer. Hopefully some one who has tried this will add a post about it.Aloha,Kokua
I hear what all of you are saying about how it will suck but wanna know what? i don’t care, it’sa good learning expeirence. i garuntee it can be perfected maybe not by me but it can. enough practice , i bet i would look good. plus for a first board second glass job who cares i won’t be able to sell a 5 foot fish.
While we are on the subject…I have a red full tint to do my first red tint deck and bottom. Is red a bad color too?
Should i go for a light red or a dark? I’m thinking the lighter colours work best?
TM