First of all, newer versions of our finish resins have benefitted from developments in coating technologies. New additives for flow and leveling have made vast improvements in product performance. Chemistry notwithstanding, make certain that your surface is free of any grease, wax or dust. Assuming you have just finished sanding your substrate until is is nothing short of perfect at 220 grit, now give your surface a good cleaning with acetone, followed by removal of dust by clean, dry compressed air, followed by a wipe with a tack cloth, preferably an anti-static wipe cloth. Sanding fiberglass creates thousands of volts of static electricity and a single dust particle can create a repulsion known as a “fish eye”. It is not advisable to spray on a gloss coat because all the resin that has atomized and fallen onto your substrate has now got to coalesce back to a smooth liquid and lose any air bubbles. It is far better to brush your gloss resin in long vertical strokes, followed by cross strokes, until you have reached your desired thickness. You should have taped-off any areas where you don’t want drips to fall or telegraph onto. Lastly, WAIT a good few minutes for your brush strokes to disappear which, on some resins, allows your very important surfacing agent to rise to the surface and create a blush. Gloss resin has much more than wax in its surfacing agent and is imperative to barcol hardness achieved in the cure. This is crucial to polishing and achieving a mirror finish. Tips about finishing: Use light pressure when sanding. If using an orbital sander, allow the weight of the machine only to do the work. Block-sand to spread the downward pressure on the sandpaper over the largest surface area as possible – as opposed to sanding without a backer. You’ll get ripples with finger pressure. Blow off your sandpaper frequently to avoid clogging. After 220 grit, use wet-dry sandpaper with water and a drop of soap in your water. Rinse often After going through your grits (400, 600, 800, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000) commence with your compounds. NEVER DWELL IN AN AREA. Keep your polisher moving. Don’t allow heat to accumulate.

Polyester resin is inhibited by atmospheric oxygen. “Surfacing agents” like wax are put into our Sanding Resin so that they float to the surface of the wet resin and suffocate the resin during curing. This makes the resin cure bone dry and allows sandpaper to grind off powder without clogging up the sandpaper pores. That surface scum is called a “blush”. Laminating resin is unwaxed resin and is designed to cure with a little surface tack due to the oxygen interface but this is a good thing because it gives ensuing layers of resin a very reactive sticky surface to bond to. Typically, layer after layer (laminates) are laid down until finally your desired lamination schedule is complete, at which time, “Sanding resin” is applied so that you can sand without gumming up sandpaper. Some guys call this a “hot coat” and they will simply throw together some laminating resin with a couple % of paraffin wax melted into Styrene monomer – this stuff is called “Surfacing Agent”. (Wax won’t melt directly into laminating resin very well). Adding Surfacing Agent to Solarez is not a good idea as the Styrene is a “reactive diluent” and it throws off the photoinitiator ratio which makes your resin cure tacky, softer and with more yellowing. A note about Sanding or Gloss coats: Do not put another layer of any resin directly on top of a Sanding or Gloss coat without a surface prep consisting of a good sanding, an acetone wipe followed by a wipe with a tack cloth, preferably an anti-static tack cloth. If you want a “deeper” look, achieve depth with your laminating resin and try to finish with ONE capping coat.

It is super important to surface prep the ding area AND to 1/2″ outside the perimeter of the ding area so that the resin can have a better mechanical bond. Sand the perimeter of the ding with 60 grit sandpaper until it begins to get “furry” – this is the fiberglass beginning to show. Use masking tape to mask off the perimeter of the ding beyond the 1/2″ region that you have sanded. Here is something that you may not normally notice: if your board has only one ding in it and you are repairing it on a hot day, that little hole can vent a lot of pressure as the board heats up, so “pre-heat” your board for a few minutes because if you put a thin layer of wet resin on the board and it is a dark colored board on a sunny day, the air inside the board can expand and blow your resin filling right out.  Use a piece of clear plastic wrap over the wet resin and stretch it tight so that it conforms to the contour of your board and any excess resin spilled over onto the masking tape. Cure it in the sun, a few seconds at a time, waiting a minute or so in between blasts so as not to accumulate heat. When the resin is WELL CURED, peel off the plastic in a most obtuse angle so as not to lift the resin upward.

If you wanted to spray a Solarez coating, it would be best to choose the lowest viscosity resin, namely Ultra Thin Bone Dry, or one of our polyester resins. It would be more advantageous to brush on a Gloss resin because when you spray and atomize resin, you will need to wait for air bubbles to coalesce and return to a smooth bubble-free liquid. If you wanted to spray a polyester resin, you could dilute the resin with acetone (up to 5-10%) or MEK (methyl ethyl ketone, not MEKP) only as a vehicle – something to get it out of the gun, onto your substrate. Once it is on your substrate, you will need to allow the acetone to “gas-off”. If you don’t , it will create pin holes when your resin cures. At room temperature, it could take 15 minutes to gas off. it is NOT advisable to dilute Solarez polyester resin with Styrene monomer as a diluent because you will throw off the photo initiator ratio and cause the resin to cure tacky, cure softer and prematurely yellow.

Solarez resins typically contain “air release” in them and should allow bubbles to pop at room temperatures. If you have a stubborn bubble, wait a few minutes and if it still doesn’t pop, you can gently blow hot air at it with a hair dryer. I have seen some people use a propane or MAP burner but that is a bit extreme. A hair dry is much safer. If you are working with thick resin or if it is exceptionally cold, you will find hot air to be helpful in popping bubbles.If you are working with polyester resin, keep in mind that it is flammable and an open flame is not a great idea.

Surface prep is pinnacle. Sealing the substrate is important if the substrate is going to absorb resin at unequal rates. Woods are obviously very porous but some woods such as Cocobolo also exude oils that can seriously affect the adhesion of coatings.  Flat-sanding the substrate is done to level the substrate as your gloss coat will expose and amplify any surface imperfection. Once flat-sanded to a uniform smoothness of approximately 180-320 grit, you’ll want to seal the surface with a good grain sealer. Shellac has been used for centuries and is quite effective however it sometimes takes a few coats with drying time in between to do the job. Solarez has two versions of UV-cure sanding sealers that can fill large voids and do so in but a few minutes. Our Vinyl Ester Epoxy Sanding Sealer is effective at sealing even Cocobolo and helps to prime the surface of other low energy substrates like the black phenolic joint of a pool cue. Once the sealer coat is cured and smooth sanded, it is very important to remove all sanding dust by dry air and removal of oil or grease by acetone wipe followed by a tack cloth and finally followed by an anti-static tack cloth because sanding creates electrostatic charges that can repel resin into a characteristic “fish-eye”. "Craters" look just like the name implies; small indentations and these are most commonly caused by a contaminant in the coating resin. It is ALWAYS advisable to cone filter your finish resins because the effort is minimal but saves heaps of time if your finish coat lays out nicely from the start. Cone filtering at approximately 120 mesh will get rid of most contaminants but surface contaminants like silicone, oil or wax need to be be eradicated by a wipe with a clean acetone rag.  Lastly, a common aberration called "orange peel" is not common to solarez products because this typically happens to solvent-containing products. We do not use solvents, Solarez products are 100% solids coatings.

UV-Cure resins are packaged and are ready to rapidly polymerize in seconds at any time by UV light exposure. They can cure slowly by heat or by contact with oxidizers or metals but they are kept in liquid state by “inhibitors” in the formula that rely on oxygen to make them effective. In order to prolong the shelf-life of Solarez resins, you can do so by storing them in a container with lots of “head space” that is, air space above the liquid level. In fact, if you were to suffocate the resin by filling up to the lid and then closing the lid, your resin might not even last a week at room temperature, less yet at elevated temperatures. A good amount of head space is about 10% the height of the container but if you fill your container to half-full and keep it at room temperature and open the lid from month-to-month and stir the resin slightly, you can make the product last just about indefinitely. The cans we use are epoxy-phenolic internally coated but if you use a bare metal can, this too will reduce shelf-life, as will keeping the resin in elevated temperatures like over 85°F. It is not necessary to refrigerate the resin but temperatures not lower than 40°F are good. Tubed products like our putties are different because they are thick and it’s difficult to get oxygen to them. Still we say up to 3 years shelf-life on our polyester ding repair putties are normal. The one product that just seems to be difficult to keep for more than a year is our vinyl ester epoxy putty “Solarez EXTREME“. it has a shelf life of a year and could be extended a bit by lower temperatures but 2 years is about max. The vinyl ester epoxy liquid resins can have their shelf-life greatly enhanced by allowing good head space and stirring monthly and keeping at room temperature.

If you want to layer (laminate) resin and make ensuing layers adhere well to each other, that is entirely possible and can be designed to work even better if you cure the initial layer to approximately 90% of its cure. In other words, if you normally cure tack-free in 30 seconds, try irradiating your laminating layers with only 15-20 seconds each. You can make ensuing layers stick quite well to each other this way, or if you have cured the layer bone dry, you can prep for another layer by sanding the substrate with about 150 grit sandpaper. This will give you a good mechanical bond.

First of all, ascertain that your pigments, dyes, tints, colorants are NOT water-based. Most any solvent based colorant will work. You may add translucent “tints” or “dyes” and even opaque “pigments” to a certain degree but avoid coloring to the point of opacity where light cannot transmit through your resin. This is especially true with colors leaning toward reds  and all the more important if using black. If you really want to use a lot of color, you can apply the resin in thinner layers like 1/16″ at a time. You can also get more power in UV light penetration by using a magnifying glass – this works best with sunlight, it’s a cute trick. If you are building lures or have castings of deep parts, you might consider our Polyester “Dual-Cure” Casting Resin. This will cure by UV light and/or by the addition of MEKP catalyst. You can make a black bowling ball with this resin. Look for developments in this area in the Solarez Fly-Tie resins in the near future.

Yes, and see the previous two answers for reasoning.

All Solarez Fly Tie resins are specially designed to have virtually no yellowing whatsoever. When the resin first cures, there will be a light yellow cast to it. Do not be alarmed as this will go away in about 24-48 hours through a process called “photo-bleaching”. Once 100% cured and “bleached” the resins are of the exact same chemical makeup as high-end automotive clear coat finishes and are hard, glossy, resilient and non-yellowing. “Epoxies” on the other hand are quite notorious for yellowing.

Well, try to avoid this. It means you are curing too quickly and it happens almost solely with the Ultra Thin BONE DRY product. You can avoid this by first irradiating the resin with the flashlight placed about 12″ away and only irradiating for one second. Wait 30 seconds and do this again a second and third time. Now you can irradiate at full speed ahead and even bring your flashlight down to within 6″. What you are doing is attenuating the cure and it is very effective at reducing the exotherm of the reaction. If you cure “full speed ahead” you risk yellowing the resin and reducing adhesion due to excess heat.

This product is an OUTSTANDING performer but it has one quark: it crystallizes with prolonged exposure to temperatures below 45°F. This probably will not occur at your location but it might occur in shipping along the way to your place. If this does occur, it will look like the resin has gone clumpy, like crystallized honey. The remedy, same as honey, heat the resin to about 125°F. A quick solution is: using the glass container it comes in, loosen the lid so it can breathe and place it in a microwave oven. Depending on your microwave, it might take one or two or three sessions of 10 seconds to bring it back to its clear state again. It might need to get to a temperature of 125°F – right about where the bottle feels a little too hot to hold. A more prudent approach would be to plop the bottle of the BONE DRY in a 6oz or so cup of steaming hot but not boiling hot water for about 5 minutes. This will melt the crystals and, the resin will be perfectly good again and it will stay like this for years. However, If the resin is exposed again to a temperature of under 45°F for a few hours, it will crystallize again. The same remedy will fix it. Interesting note: Tupelo honey does not crystallize.

This is a matter of prudence and safety. Just as you would not stare at the sun – even for seconds, you would not want to repeatedly stare at the UV light emitted by a strong UV flashlight. Basic “UV-A & UV-B 400” safety glasses from HOME DEPOT and for that matter, good sunglasses are a prudent choice while working with UV-A light from any source.

(most people are savvy about checking Amazon for “stronger/cheaper” torches and not aware that it’s also a question of wavelength) The best light is sunlight because it has multiple wavelengths in the UV-A region (315nm – 400nm). UV-B (280nm – 315nm) has less effect on Solarez because we designed it to work with longer wavelength UV-A. There are metal halide lamps that are very effective but they are hot and take time to warm up and emit ozone and are a bit on the dangerous side. Fluorescent [tanning] bulbs work very well but quality varies quite a bit from manufacturer to manufacturer. PHILLIPS is an outstanding brand.  LED flashlight (torches) have become quite good lately. The best type called SMD (sheet mounted diode) type and produce much more light than the old “bulb” style. LED flashlights only put out ±5nm so if you order a 395 flashlight, you get 390nm – 400nm and that’s it. This is one reason why fluorescent lamps work so well over larger areas. The SMD LED chip that is the workhorse of the “SOLAREZ RESINATOR” is exceptionally good. It is Korean, 385nm, quite powerful and the reflector is a smooth type as opposed to a stipple type which concentrates energy better. Lastly, the Korean origin chip we use seems to be better than the Chinese origin chips we tested. It puts out more power in the 385nm region. Other lights do work to a certain degree; for example a 365nm chip will work but does not cure our resin to a perfect “tack free” finish. Likewise a 395nm lamp will work but still not as tack free as the “Resinator” @ 385nm. Just as a key fits a lock, wavelength specificity is pinnacle in UV -curing. We offer smaller flashlights that are also 385nm but are of lower wattage but they still do a good job of curing tack free. It appears as though wavelength is more critical than wattage.

Solarez EXTREME (vinyl ester) has the best adhesion and best strength of all Solarez products. It is the resin of choice for difficult-to-bond substrates such as sheet molding compound (SMC) used on personal watercraft or olefin-containing thermoplastics like on motorcycle fairings and snowmobiles.

Only Solarez EPOXY (blue tube) will work on Styrofoam. Solarez polyester contains styrene monomer and will melt the Styrofoam. Even EXTREME (vinyl ester epoxy) contains styrene and can not be used directly on Styrofoam. It is possible however, to put a thin sealer coating of Solarez epoxy onto the Styrofoam, cure it, and then subsequently coat with whichever resin you elect, such as the durable Solarez vinyl ester. This is an excellent way to get around the obstacle of expensive resins to coat Styrofoam.

Yes, to a degree. Most any color (except black) may be added in moderation. Reds should be avoided or used sparingly. The idea here is light transmission. If light cannot penetrate the resin, it cannot cure it. So, if you want a thick (>1/8”) pigmented section, add 1% MEKP catalyst to your batch, this will allow the surface to cure by UV reaction. The resin will exotherm (heat up) and cause the underlying resin to cure faster than normal by the MEKP catalyst component.

[Pure] “Conventional” polyester resin was designed to cure tacky on the surface so that subsequent layers (laminates) can bond well –the reason why is because atmospheric oxygen inhibits the curing of polyester resin so the surface remains tacky. Paraffin wax can be added to the resin of a capping coat such as sanding resin in order to allow it to cure dry. As the resin cures, the wax rises to the surface and “suffocates” the resin. Glossing resin contains both wax and a thickening or no-sag agent (cabosil) added. This allows the resin to cure dry and in thicker coats without running off the edges. This was the case with all [MEKP] conventionally-catalyzed resins. However with Solarez, the UV-curing agent is much stronger than MEKP catalyst and can cure bone-dry even without the addition of a suffocating wax. This is beneficial because wax can taint the bond of a resin to the substrate. If you want to cure Solarez tacky so that subsequent layers and be added, simply cure it for a shorter period of time (such as 1-1/2 minutes) and the surface will be tacky and ready for good bonding of a subsequent laminate. If you want the resin to cure bone-dry so that it sands easily without gumming sand pads, simply cure it completely (about 3 minutes) in good sunlight or artificial UV light source.

When stored at room temperature (72°F), Solarez Epoxy has a shelf-life of about 5 years; Solarez Polyester, about 2 years, Solarez Microlite, about 1-1/2 years and Solarez Extreme, about 1 year. All products’ shelf-life decrease with increasing storage temperature and conversely with decreased storage temperature. Storing tubes in a closed car, where temperature may reach over 180°F may kill a tube in one day.

Just like other adhesives, resins and common reagents, SOLAREZ® contains chemicals which are not desirable for bodily contact or prolonged exposure. According to our directions, placing a piece of clear plastic over the repair site will keep your fingers clean, reduce fumes and provide a smoother, bubble-free (stronger) repair. Use SOLAREZ® with adequate ventilation and if you absolutely must handle the resin, exercise common sense, WEAR GLOVES.

Unlike dangerous M.E.K.P. catalyst, whose reaction proceeds irreversibly and sometimes catastrophically forward, SOLAREZ® ‘ can be interrupted at any time. Simply remove it from sunlight. When it is replaced into sunlight again, the reaction will resume. You may take advantage of this feature for making clean trims when the resin has reached its “gel-stage”, roughly 45 seconds in good sunlight.

SOLAREZ® quickly hardens but only when exposed to direct sunlight. In the shade, you have all the time you need to put the goop where you want it and to remove excess bubbles.

No. Chop-strand fiberglass is evenly dispersed throughout the SOLAREZ® putty. This type of reinforcement provides better strength when repairing chips, dents and gouges because more fibers get into the ding and they align themselves in multiple directions. For large, shallow jobs (in excess of one square foot) we recommend the use of SOLAREZ® laminating resin in conjunction with fiberglass cloth. For patching good-sized holes where there is no backing, try our convenient SOLAREZ® pre-preg patch. It’s a Solarez- impregnated patch of fiberglass cloth for ultra-quick field repairs. This was used in “Operation Desert Storm”.