A couple comments... On 6/6/19 3:46 AM, Burton Lowry wrote: ...
Anyway, at this point you have so little money in the boat, I would suggest covering what is done with a good coating of epoxy with fiberglass cloth that is saturated with epoxy. There are lots of good tutorials on working with epoxy. If you are working on a vertical surface you will need to thicken the epoxy to keep it from running out of the cloth and repair area.
When you're laying on the cloth, no, do not thicken the resin. You only saturate the cloth itself with the resin and squeegee off/out any excess. Surface of cloth should be almost dry looking. When the resin is absorbed in the cloth itself, it is not going to run out. If you have resin running down/out then that is excess that should be squeegeed off. Thickening resin for this part of the process will reduce how quickly & fully it will saturate the cloth. For filling the cloth weave, after you've done the initial saturation and it has hardened beyond the "green" stage, you may consider thickening the resin for vertical surfaces. However a thin enough coat will not run, so you can just use several thin coats rather than trying to fill with one thick coat. Several thin coats will usually get to a level surface with less excess to sand off than trying to do one thick coat. You can find plenty of arguments about this on relevant forums... :-)
Gentle heat gets it to harden faster.
Also will reduce the final cure strength in most cases, trying to force the cure. It is a chemical cure not a solvent evaporation cure, there is no benefit and some downsides to rushing it. Use a resin and hardener combo designed for the temperature range you will be working in. You can add weave-filling thin coats before the prior coat is 100% cured (which is often several days or more in terms of the full chemical reaction). Read the details from your epoxy supplier manual as to re-coating and "final" cure times.
The fumes are poisonous, and skin becomes easily sensitized to it.
It's polyester/vinylester resin products that have toxic fumes right out of the can. Epoxy that is not solvent-diluted is basically inert and has no VOC (volatile organic compounds). If you heat it to try and force a cure you might generate some dangerous VOC, I don't know, I wouldn't heat it for reasons already given. The skin sensitivity issue is for real however, so always wear gloves when working with the material.
Each hardened layer of epoxy must have the amine blush removed with hot water and a scotch pad scrubbing.
Read the info from your epoxy supplier. In most cases recoating before full final cure time means there's no need to do this (because there is no amine blush yet). It's when you let it cure fully before recoating that you may get amine blush. Mostly this applies to the final layer of epoxy, which you must let fully cure before putting something else over it, and then prep properly as Burton says. There are some formulations with less blush than others, and some that claim to have eliminated it. There's tons of online info about all this, just search for example epoxy amine blush and get the full info from your product manufacturer. Happy fixin'! cheers, john -- John Schinnerer - M.A., Whole Systems Design -------------------------------------------- - Eco-Living - Whole Systems Design Services People - Place - Learning - Integration john@eco-living.net - 510.982.1334 http://eco-living.net http://sociocracyconsulting.com