Age has an insidious way of sneaking up on you thought Reece has he left the doghouse and drove down to Freo, still worse for wear after a wine dinner two nights ago. Fortunately, the sun shone, the children were relatively happy and at school and it’ll probably only take two weeks or so to dig his way out of this hole and back into the wife’s good graces. Time to make short work of the wood gluing today.
Chris, keen as ever, had laid out the hull pieces and boat floor up in the shed’s mezzanine ready for gluing. When Reece arrived they meet up in the build container to talk chemistry.
Chris – so it says here that we mix the epoxy resin with the catalyst at 3.5 parts to 1 part.
Reece – hmmmm?
C – I’m thinking we do 300g of resin and 150g of hardener..
R – sounds like a lot
C – we’ve got eight times two plus one joins to do but is the math right
R –
C – is the math right?
R – ummm, tickity mate. I’m going for a coffee and croissant before I fall over again. Want one?
So, with priorities sorted, Chris continued moving weights upstairs to the mezzanine while Reece did a coffee run to the local.
The process that was then followed was that Chris weighed out 350g of epoxy resin into a plastic container and then added another 100g of hardener, stirred the mixture for one minute and then hot-footed up the stairs to the pre-laid pieces of wood.
Each piece had a black builder’s plastic under the join so that when the epoxy was applied and the joint made, it wouldn’t then glue itself to the wooden floor. The boys had also pre-prepared extra plastic to be laid over the top of each join, a slab of wood to distribute weight and a stack of gym weights to place atop each join. Cracker!
Unfortunately, within five minutes of pasting the glue to the joins, the whole tub started to smoke and proceeded to “go off”. Within seconds the mixture went from a slightly clear liquid to hot toffee and then solid heat source with no give. Oh dear. Maybe the maths was correct but just too abundant in application.
The boys paused, having glued together half of the sideboards and set about have a tea break, calm down and reset. This time Reece did his best Breaking Bad impression and mixed approximately 100g of epoxy and 28g of hardener (although the scales turned off when pouring the hardener – shhhh, don’t tell Chris!). This was then applied to the remaining joins. A rubber mallet was also used to settle any disagreement between opposing joints and ensuring that each fit was good and proper.
And that was it for Day 3. Given the boys’ complete lack of any knowledge, they decided to wait until the next day to see whether or not this gluing process worked before turning their attention to the remain boards.