Do i have to worry about drying the cloth out to much with RR resin, does it act just like regular resins? what makes it so easy to work with? and what do you guys think of the single board kits that foam ez sells?
Check out the sticky atop this forum page having to do with eps and epoxy. It is specific to the RR products.
if you pull the cloth too dry with RR, you’ll have some problems with your hotcoat. just use very light pressure in spreading around the resin, and the cloth more or less wets itself out.
What makes it so easy to work with? You can take your time with the lamination, you can spend 30 mins laminating a board. You can go the the fridge, answer a phone call etc. There is no rush. Also the epoxy stays in place, you don’t get nearly the same amount of run off as poly. The down side is that the resin has to soak into the cloth, you can’t push it in like poly. So the trade off is that you don’t get really good colored resin work. Meaning that, you don’t get crisp swirls, and darker color full tints come out blotchy. You can also come back over dry spots with a cheater fill coat
The down side to it is that it takes more time in the flip process of the lamination. But it’s a great product if your doing clear boards.
-Jay
Yea…let the resin soak in for a few minutes after you lightly spread it out, then pull out the resin from the stringer to the rail and do your laps. I find you can conserve some resin if you cut your cloth, then fold it off the rail and paint your foam with resin along the rail with a brush, then lay the cloth back down. That way you’re sure to get good saturation on the rails without a lot of spill-off.
I just did some resin swirls with RR for the first time, and I agree that you don’t get the really crisp colors, esp. if you’re working with 6 oz glass. Upon close inspection you can see the weave in lots of places. It still looks cool, though.
I just started glassing a board these weekend with RR and I didn’t find it hard at all to wet out the cloth. At least on the flats, rails were another story. I started by wetting out the flats and swirling the resin. It was blue and white, so I put the white down first and waited about 5 minutes to let it soak in, then filled in the missing spots with blue like Austin does on his swirl jobs. I did get some pretty bright and separate white and blue sides, and then some other not so bright ones that were the result of pulling too much blue over the white (Hey, it was the first whole board I’ve ever laminated, we all make mistakes).
My only issue was that after wetting the laps I went back and played with the flats and by the time I got back to wrap the rails, all the resin had actually fallen out of the laps. There was color in the actual weave, but it was dry in between. I’m guessing it’s the surface tension of the resin that messed me up, but I figured with a particularly viscous resin like epoxy, it wouldn’t move much. Any thoughts?
Has anyone done an acid splash or swirl directly on the shaped foam? If your going to seal the foam before laminating it maybe this would work. I know Ambrose has does his resin art directly on the foam and then laminates it using polyester resin. Looks good too.Mike
I know exactly what you’re talking about with the dry lap cloth. It really helps to paint the rails with resin before you do anything else. That way, when you lap the cloth, it sticks to the painted rail. Don’t worry about your swirl color on the rails… when the resin drips over the rails and carries the pigment with it, it will soak into the lap cloth on the way down, and you’ll still get that color when you lap up the cloth. I just did a five color resin splash with a blue base tint, and I made sure I drizzled some color on the lap cloth to get that tiger stripe effect. It worked, even though I painted the foam with the blue base tint first.
Another thing I found is that when you start to pull out the excess resin, do one side at a time, starting along the stringer and pull toward you, lapping the rail in one stroke. Start in the middle of the board, work to the tail, then go back to the middle, and work to the nose. Go to the other side of the board and do the same thing. This way, you pull color from the middle and onto the rails. If you do it right, you won’t need to go back over it too many times, which pulls some of the color out or mixes colors. Pulling too much resin out shows the weave, too. That first pull is important - it should be firm and even. Do the entire board that way once, and when you go back after that, use really light pressure, just to get the beads or trails of resin that are on top of the cloth, not to pull anything out of the cloth.
One last thought… From what somebody here at Sways said, it’s my understanding that in true resin swirls, the colors are mixed in the bucket then poured on at the same time. In a resin splash, you pour the color on the cloth, then the base color fills in the dry spots - that sounds like what you and I did.