With the weather cooling off, I’m going to have a hard time keeping my temps where they need to be in my garage. I already have some poly resin, but I can’t use that inside my house where I can keep temps up. I was thinking I could instead get some epoxy resin and make the repair in a spare room in my house since the temp will be fine and there’s no harmful VOCs / way less stink.
My only real concern is that I’ll be making a bad repair with epoxy resin on a poly glassed board. The repair is a buckled nose (a previous post I made that I’m finally getting around to doing for a trip I have coming up). I’ll be filling the buckles with qcell, and adding a couple layers of fiberglass to the area.
Ohhhkkkkaaay, first, unless we’re talking the sub zero temps inside of a freezer, polyester resin will go off eventually, it just takes a while longer.
As well, epoxy is expensive and kinda persnickety.
So here’s what you do. First, how old is your catalyst? It’s been my experience that it gives up before the resin does. If it smells like vinegar ( acetic acid) it’s broken down over time. Replace it. If you’re in doubt replace it anyways.
So, what next? Get thee to a Harbor Freight or similar, get yourself a halogen work light like this. Not LED, you want the old school burns-a-lot-of-power halogen sort. The wattage, well, LED lights give out light that’s pretty much all visible spectrum. The halogens, no, a lot of visible light but a lot of other wavelengths too, including infrared. They make a good heat lamp in addition to lighting up what you’re working on REAL WELL. You don’t have to cook it all night, in fact you might delam the board that way, but long enough to kick the resin off. Keep it a few feet away from the repair/resin. Polyester fires are smoky, y’know.
Take your time. It will help if you do your several layers of glass in one go, The resin gives off a little heat as it goes off, thicker layup goes off faster. Your filler will take care of itself.
I would stick with an “in kind” repair using Poly. You’ll have to do a lot of surface prep, sanding etc. to make it stick like it should. Epoxy sticks better to Poly than Poly to Epoxy. But only if it is fresh Poly Lam or properly prepped finish resin.