I’m working on a 9’6" for my dad (he’s getting older and has never surfed, but has always wanted to since I started) and he’s a big fan of Greg Noll so I’m making him a copy of a noll pintail beachboard/slotbottom. He would like it to be black but with about a 3 in. strip along the stringer on the deck clear, so the stringer can still be seen. I searched through the files but couldn’t find anything definitive on how to do it. I’m doing the board with one 7.5 oz volan on the bottom and 2 on the deck and would like to avoid any painting and to do all the black with resin tint. I imagine that after laminating it, I could tape off the area around the stringer, put the pigment in the hot coat, lay it on, and then put another hotcoat covering the whole deck, but I read that sanding a pigmented hotcoat doesn’t come out that well often. Is there a way do this in the lam and how? I know that pigmented volan looks awesome. I thought I might lam about 5 inches along the stringer with unpigmented resin, let it kick, tape off the area I want to be left clear, and then carefully lam the rest of the deck. I attached a picture I found of pretty much how he wants it to look. Thanks, any help is greatly appreciated…
IMHO, the only way to do it neatly would be to do a black tinted layer of laminating resin after the hot coat has been sanded, masking off where you don’t want any black. Then a clear gloss coat. I believe that’s the way it was done then.
Or a first tinted gloss, sand, clear gloss? Is there a risk of black tint dripping when glossing over if it’s laminating resin? Anyone?
For panels that big we use hotcoat resin with a bit of extra surfacing agent. Kick it off hot and pull the tape when the resin starts getting “thick”. Then sand it with 220 or 320 and gloss afterwards. Here is one shot this way.
well only thing i can say is use gloss resin instead of laminating resin for the panel color work i was tought that lam resin has a tendacy to bleed the color when glossed over.(never happened to me cause i never not use gloss resin but if guys that have been doing it longer than ive been alive say it then im going to listen)
use cobalt and a little surfacing agent so it flow out nice then lightly sand the color and gloss over.
There’s a couple of other approaches… (1) Paint on the hotcoat: Clear volan lam (1 layer), hotcoat, sand, mask and spray color, clear 4 oz. lam, hotcoat, gloss. You’ll still get the volan treatment in the masked areas, and the painted surfaces will be very durable under the 4 oz.
(2) Color lam: Clear lam volan (1 layer), mask stringer, color lam 4 oz to masking both sides, reverse the masking and clear lam 4 oz insets, clear lam over everything with 4 oz. This ends up with 7.5 x double 4 oz both sides to minimize weight. If the color lam cuts look ragged, line them with a black posca before glossing.
The problem with this sort of color work is getting the edges sharp without pinlines. With paint over a hotcoat, it’s all in the tape. With a color lam, the 4 oz will cut very defined. Using color hotcoats will also give you a sharp edge, but it’s more difficult to get it perfect in my opinion. Most color panels in old boards were done in gloss, and usually not clear overcoated. The trick in this method is all in the brushing (somewhat in mixing the color also) so that no sanding is done except scraping the tape line.
The easiest way to do this is obviously by presealing the blank with clear acrylic, painting, and clear volan, but it sound like you want to do it with resin.
