Question: spray-paint glass over freelap

Hello there,

I just finished shaping my first board and it came out surprisingly well for a first time. I will now spraypaint directly on the (PU) foam as I dont want to mess aropund with tints etc to keep it simple. I have a couple of questions though:

  1. it is obviously a perfectly white and nicely sanded foam now - do I need to use an acrylic white base primer underneath or is this not necessary?

  2. am I right in understanding that I should seal it afterwards with acrylic varnish before laminating?

  3. I do not fully grasp the concept of a freelap, yet. In my understanding a cutlap produces a slightly darker shade of the same color around the rails - would this also be the case when not using tints but just the resin and the same two layers of fibre? If i end up with a darker color where at the overlaps then I prefer to have sth neat and clean and would rather opt for a cutlap. Thanks for your advice - I struggle to get my head around that and cannot find any good explanation on the web.

Cheers!

cokabottle

Well done.  No need for a white undercoat; you really want to minimize the amount of paint between the resin and foam to help avoid delam.  Freelap is not doing a cut lap.  A non-tinted resin shouldn’t produce a noticably darker area.  However, sometimes it will look slightly darker while the resin is fully curing; could be a day or two.  And if, for some reason it is still noticably darker, leave it bake in the sun for a few hours.  Just cut the cloth as cleanly as possible and long enough so it wraps to about where you want on the other side of the board.  Then just wet out and pull the cloth around the board without worring about anything except the odd fiberglass string hanging down.  BUT, because you did a spray on one side, DO put down a thin seal coat of either acrylic or (better) a thin seal coat of resin so you don’t scrape your nice paint job off the foam and spread color to places where you don’t want color.