OK, here’s the question… I’m on my third board and I want to do a resin tint. I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with doing cut laps and glassing with tint, but I can’t figure out how to get the look I want on the rails. The problem is the double top layer… where do you stop the first layer without creating another color variation on the rail. My last board I lapped both top layers of 6oz all the way. Looks good, but I want to lose some of that weight.
I’ve thought of two things, cutting the first layer to fit within the bottom laps and laming in one step ( I think it would look messy though). Or doing the top lam in two steps, taping off the rails and doing another cut lap there. The second scares me because I’m not sure how the color in the second layer will take to the first. I’ve noticed resin and foam have a very differnt look when glassed over with a tint. Seems like two steps will add weight which I’m trying to get rid of.
Also, I’m shooting for a darker tint to the rails than on the deck and the bottom, and with both of those thoughts above I’ve got two layers on the top and two layers on the rails which makes me think I might just end up with a lighter colored bottom.
Any help or advice will be very much appreciated, thanks in advance.
It is more work (& more weight) but the way Gene Cooper gets his glass work to ‘pop’ so nice is by glassing one layer - the first one - with the tint and then a layer of 4 oz in clear over that. Gives the good look of resin right on the foam - sparklies, if you’re lucky - and then the depth of a kind of a clearcoat. If you just use 4 oz for everything, or 6, then 4, its not that bad…the 4 doesn’t even need cutlaps, freelaps over the tint will completely disappear.
I cut the bottom layer at the top of the rail line and over lap the top layer. There is a color difference but it’s hard to notice. I am not sure how this works with darker colors. I usually just tint with yellow and other light colors. For Volan cloth, I glass one layer at a time one for the color and glass again with clear cloth. (I’ll include the deck/tail patch if I want that area to appear darker and deeper looking.) I am sure there are other ways to do this also. For tinting, make sure your shaped blank is really clean because the flaws will be pronounced after tinting.
doing it different ways will give you a different effect.
for the rails to come a shade darker (which I like) I do the bottom then as full length deck patch to the first lap with a second layer over this, and wet out in one go.
to keep things the same I would tape off and do the deck patch firstand cut to the first lap, then a clear layer over that. make sure that you mix up enough resin and leave half the uncatalysed resin to one side so your working from the same batch.
the other way is to do it as like no1. but mix in less colour paste for the deck and patch. but i think no.2 is a better method. with no2. you can even use a difftent colour for the deck.
the other thing I sometimes like to do, is cut a dimond shapped fin patch and put this under the glass and it comes out slightly darker
personally I prefere the rails darker as is shows the workmanship thats gone into the board and sets it apart from a spayed board.
the over thing you can do is a foam stain with tinted resin prior to glassing the blank.
Thanks for all the responses everyone, I’ve definitely got some good new ways to think about glassing it now. I’m still a little up in the air and I won’t be glassing until sometime next week, so if anyone else wants to give me more to think about it’s much appreciated.
I really want to try and get a nice clean lap, so I don’t even have to pinstripe it. All from the same colored batch of resin, with the lap creating those darker rails… I love how that looks. Ambishious for a third board I know, but I was close on the last one so now have to try and perfect it. If it doesn’t work it’s a good excuse to do another.
One other problem I ran to was bubles in my blank (Elova) last time. I filled them with cab o sil. They’re strong, but the tint didn’t soak in the same as it did to the foam, leaving me with a few discolored spots on the bottom. Will spackle be more even if I run into that problem again? I think I got a better blank this time (Bennett), so hopefully it won’t be an issue.