Oops - spray paint and epoxy resin curdling

General Discussion
1

Hi everyone, looking for help getting out of a jam! 

Almost done with a board, glassing with Resin Research epoxy and wanted to do a pink stripe near the rails.

I glassed with epoxy, did the hot coat, then sanded to 220.

Taped off the pinlines and sprayed them with “Rustoleum Painters Touch” from Home Depot. It never occured to me to check the compatibility of the paint with the resin or anything else, I made the mistake of just grabbing the first/cheapest spray paint I could find. It’s an oil based spray.

Let the paint dry overnight and nexy day did the epoxy gloss coat. As it was drying, it kind of “beaded up”, or curdled, where the paint was. Some areas are fine, most are not… I’m attaching a photo.

What should I do? Sand the pink off completely and try again with different paint? Use the same paint, but seal with acrylic before the gloss coat?  

The board doesn’t have to be perfect, it isn’t going to be in a museum. But I’d like it to look better than it does now, and to learn from my mistakes…

Thanks in advance,

-Jack

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2

Ooh that’s nasty.  Not sure what the right, or best answer is, but I’ll just comment from my experience for now, and the smarter, wiser, more experienced guys can comment later. 

Thats a pretty big pinline, at least it looks pretty big in the pic.  Probably less problematic if it were a skinny little line.  I think you’re definitely gonna have to sand the resin, and probably take some of the pink with it.

If you want to use the same paint for the re-do, I would proceed thus: gently wetsand the paint before resin (very fine grit), careful not to go through.  Then mix a TINY bit of resin, and squeegee it over the pink as thin a coat as you possibly can.  So thin it really can’t even fish-eye, or “curdle”, like that.  When it starts to set up and get tacky, then mix and spread your normal thickness resin over.  That should eliminate the tendecy to do what it did to you.

But maybe there are other better ways of dealing with the problem.  Like a pink resin line, or something.

Hope you can post some pics of the whole board, it looks pretty good in the pic.

BTW, there are a plethora of “epoy resin fish eye” threads in the archives, you aren’t the first by any means.  Epoxy can be finicky.

3

I managed to do the same with Montana Cans. I dont do it anymore, because Spraypaint caused a load of unexpected fails.

 

Out of all that i tried to rescue this stuff, this routine worked best… Sand and seal with PU Coat…

4

Rustoleum is a pain. I had an entire bottom of a board crackle and split in front of my eyes one time while using it; had to sand the whole thing off. I agree with Huck. You might have to do it again and lightly sand the paint. However, if you do it again, don’t use Rustoleum. I’ve had better success with ‘regular’ rattle can paint than with Rustoleum. Also, matte finish spray paint works better than gloss or semi gloss. But really, it’s still a crapshoot either way. I’ve moved away from spray paint and started using acrylic paint instead (airbrushing is hopefully in my future). I’ve found better results with the acrylic.

5

I like the color scheme.  However, Posca pen or airbrush with water based paint would work.  Gotta be careful with anything not water based around epoxy resins.  The fix is to sand down and try again.  Good luck.  And you’re not the first person to do this :wink:

 

6

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the advice, and encouragement haha. 

This is the third board I’ve glassed, and first time doing epoxy. When I was doing the deck, there were some spots on the laps that didn’t get completely saturated (I ran out of resin - another rookie mistake!). It looked… fine. Until I did the hotcoat, then the yellow color looked really splotchy. It was worse in some areas than others, so I had the idea to do a pinline - ish thing, that tapers and gets wider towards the nose, to try to hide my mistakes. This is all on the bottom of the board by the way. Now it looks worse than it did when it was splotchy ! Oh well. 

Part of me just wants to wax the thing and get it in the water! Maybe the resin splotches will make the board faster on rail, like dimples on a golf ball. WIshful thinking! 

I guess I should do the responsible thing and get a few different sprays and clearcoats and do some material tests on a scrap piece of foam. The “pinline” is up to three inches wide in some places, so it might be too big to color in with Posca. Anyway, at my local art store, they didn’t have the really thick chisel tip pens in the right color. Maybe I can find one online.

I’ll post more pics as I make progress on this thing, and I’ll share the results of my material tests too. 

If anyone has any other suggestions for paints/clearcoats I should try, I’ll see if I can find them, and test them out too!

-Jack

7

If that’s the worst of it. 

Scuff it up a little - Mix up some epoxy - Wait for it to start to kick, once it gets thick, squeegee it on there. 

Cure - Sand - Surf  

 

 

 

8

Quick follow up:

Wide Awake’s solution worked well enough to get me in the water! I didn’t get a “pro quality” result, but someone with more patience might have done better. Anyway, a real pro wouldn’t have made this mistake in the first place!

Thanks for the advice everyone.

 

9

WideAwake deserves some points, for saving your ass!       I gave him one, you should too.

10

Is that what the:

"like

0"

is all about?? Before I joined, I thought that was some weird slang everyone was writing at the end of their posts. Ha!

11

One more “yes” vote with WideAwake and Bill Thrailkill. [typo corrected – sorry about that, BT]

I haven’t come across a completely dependable aerosol or paint pen for color under epoxy yet. My normal, now, for any hotcoat over paint (of any kind) is to do a squeegee coat first, then lightly sand (but with rough 60/80/100 grit) and then hotcoat. If the paint is going under a lam, that’s usually fine.

And, usually if you get fisheyes, either the fisheyed coat will be OK to recover after a light/rough sand, or a light/rough sand followed by another “sealing” (meaning just wetting the dried/cured surface with resin) coat will make a following hotcoat sit down without fisheyeing.

Pens seem to be better than aerosol paints in general (assuming all are water based), and between Liquitex & MTN water based I’ve had better luck with MTN under epoxy.

12

Is that 'Threadkill" comment made on purpose or a mental slip?

13

I should add - on the deck, I did:

Epoxy hot coat 

Posca

Water based clearcoat spray (I think it was Varathane? From HD)

Epoxy gloss coat

 

No fish eyes!

 

14

Absolutely NOT on purpose and (hopefully amusingly) inapropos! I could only see one post (by someone else) in the posting page, in the browser I use.

IMO BT makes many of the best posts on this forum and helps it to stay on a good keel. God knows it’s the norm for forums to become overpopulated with nutcases who chase off the sane, competent, otherwise happy to share non-lunatics.

Sorry about the typo, BT (just went back & edited it).

More on topic: I just finished a board that I hit with MTN waterbased orange to do a “halo” theme. Could be in part related to being reminded of how regular fisheyes are with epoxy over any aerosol paint – especially Montana black & gold – but after spraying it I waited about an hour (it was hot & fairly dry in Santa Cruz today) and did a squeegee coat with RR KK, then went for a surf, came back, and did another squeegee coat on the now-drier bottom. Deck and bottom both were clearly fisheyeing like crazy up until I scraped all the excess away. I did that to fix the paint, and avoid having weird looking runs due to paint pigment mixing with resin and creating unevenness. I think I’ll do this with all “halo” paint finishes in the future.

For the board preceding today’s orange one, I also did a halo (green) and didn’t do a sealing KK coat, and the color ran and created all kinds of unevenness. I expected it might happen, but there was a time constraint and it was for a friend, not for hire. Don’t think I’ll ever try to do a lam straight onto an aerosol painted board again, where cosmetic result is at all important.

15

Hey just came across your post. Anyway I’ve had success with duplicolor spray paints. I seal my spray paint first with mod podge and once the mod podge dries for 24 hours, sand with 220ish grit and then do the epoxy over that. The mod modge is like a water based sealer so it will protect the spray paint from the epoxy chemicals. I’ve used this method on wood and plastic.