I’m about to glass the bottom of my first board…I would like to write directly on the cedar board…should I use pencil or pen (if pen…what kind - waterbased or does it matter). I did some searches but they are mostly regarding writing on foam. In my research I found one picture of some writing on a cedar board with a sharpie before glass…would thi be ok? Thanks for the help!
Use a #2 or softer pencil on foam. For writing on the stringer, any pencil is good, as long as it’s sharp. Pencil never fades, or smears from resin.
Yep use a quality pensil, not a cheapo one, they’ll have more graphit and come out darker, a 2B or HB is good.
If you use pen directly on the wood it will bleed along the grain.
I you must use a pen do it after a cheater coat or between the hot and the gloss. sand the area with 220 first.
A Porcha, Uni or zig sould not rise into the resin
but always best to do a test on a scrap first.
Personally I think the pencil looks better too
I prefer to use Acrylic paint marker on the hotcoat. After you gloss it looks as if the writing is floating between resin layers. Cool.
Of course this does not work if your not going to gloss, but you could apply a another thin hotcoat to seal it.
Lots of times the pencil fades after you glass and loses it’s clarity.
Drew
I used a 2B charcole pencile…it came out great!! Thanks guys!
I’ve had epoxy make pencil writing run. Now I write on a piece of tissue or rice paper first and lam it in when I know its dry. That way, you can test all kinds of pens with your resin first - I wrote the names of the pens on a piece of rice paper, “sharpie posca bic etc.” in their own ink and lammed a piece of cloth on a piece of balsa with the epoxy I intended to use. The best was a fine-point water-based nib tip pen from work. But every resin is different…might as well figure it out right instead of guessing 