laminating adhesive

Posted by LeeG on Jun 30, 2004

There's an elephant in the room regarding fish-eyes and the solution to eliminating them. Besides sun spots and gamma rays as a possible cause of course. The epoxy we're all using is designed for laminating wood, glass, adding fillers for gap filling and thixotropics for I forget what. It's not a paint or engineered to be a coating material where flowing out to a few mills thickness is the designed application. There are epoxy paints,,so there must be something different about epoxy paints compared to epoxy glue. With this glue we're using the molecules are all linking up to make the strongest strings, not to flow smoothly to the thinnest layers. As the epoxy cure is happening weird stuff (technical term) happens between surface tension and the epoxy becoming,,,well whatever it becomes. That's why the complaint "I did everything right, I don't get it" is so common. I put on fill coats in a dust filled shop with only a paper towel wipedown and the number of fisheyes were no different than the pristene 200proof ethyl alcohol bath with a dozen virgin boat builders. Sure silicone sealant contamination or pizza grease fingerprints are obvious but beyond a regular wipe down I think we're dealing with trying to use an adhesive for a coating and it's just not made for it. I bet there's a pinch or drop of some kind of additive that would reduce fish-eyes,,in the mean time coming back every few hours and brushing down with a 2" foam brush has worked for me to reduce the fish-eyes. Everyone has seen a fill coat look right for a couple hours,,go off to work and come back to find stalagtites off the hull. The stuff aint natural,,organic maybe but not natural.

gamma rays,,or neutrinos maybe.

In Response to: Return of the Fisheyes by Charlie Tuna on Jun 30, 2004

Replies:

No Replies.