For those of us that glass with epoxy, don’t you just love that high gloss shine that you get after your got coat or gloss coat cures?
Of coarse you have to sand the hotcoat because of the inherent bumps, but has anyone ever considered not sanding the gloss coat?
Usually, I would sand the gloss coat, then wet sand, then compound and polish.
But the thought has crossed my mind that if you get a pretty smooth gloss coat why sand it? You never get nearly as good a shine after you sand it, and for the most part it is smooth if you did a good job sanding the hotcoat.
What do you think?
No problem. Just fair the tape seam and go.
The whole polish thing is just cosmetics, actually in the really old days poly
longboards weren’t fully polished. Somebody decided to make theirs really
shiny, and everyone else followed.
Mike
Epoxy is a pain in the ass to polish
I agree ,if you get a good gloss coat on just leave it alone. or just hit it with a polisher (if that will work)
Someone needs to formulate a specific epoxy gloss coat thats hard as nails so it will polish easy
Anybody ever spray epoxy with an HVLP system…???..
I’ve had decent results with polyester gloss over rough sanded epoxy. Has anybody tried this stuff?
We’ve done a few boards with epoxy hotcoats that came out smooth enough to not sand. They look great.
But from what I understand, sanded hotcoats are faster due to the fact that water will “stick” to a smooth surface and increase drag (the adhesive properties of the water molecule). Sanded surfaces have water molecules filling the little grooves, so water will tend to slide over them (other water molecules) easier then a solid, smooth surface to which it will stick.
This came out of research done in the sailboat racing industry many years ago. The inspiration was shark skin. The fastest fish in the water is a shortfin mako… it has very rough skin.
Agreed, a 400 to 600 wet and dry finish is slicker in the water, but a real nice shine looks so much better.
If you can get the hot or gloss coats smooth enough with out any zits or fish eys then leave it,
Herb suggested using polyurethane to gloss, been trying it on repairs and seems to work great, next week I’m going to gloss a whole board with the stuff but so far it looks very promising.
The only way it seems to get the epoxy to be smooth is to heat it in the microwave, but it really shortens your work time.
I have decided to leave the gloss coat and not sand it. It has some zits, but the Shine!!!
I refuse to mess up the natural shine the epoxy gives when it hardens, when you sand it it never comes back.
I tried the polyurethane and it looks real good, but in my opinion not as good.
Finished board without sanding and polishing.
Will have more pics on another link.
sweet job
how about some close ups of the rails where the gloss overlap is fared together?
how did that come out?