epoxy eating eps

General Discussion
1

hey guys,

i was under the impression epoxy would not eat eps, am i right?

i done fix on a mates slingshot sst kite surfboard a few months ago after he put his heal through the skin, made a right mess of it.

i dug out the glass and found a top layer of high dense foam then what looked like eps foam. the foam was bust us aswell so dug some of that out and used sp106 epoxy with glass filler to build up then used paulownia strips bout 10mm thick sitting on top of that, then filled top and glassed. the back of the paulownia was totally filled with epoxy filler. anyway he replaced it and through the sst my way but said he heard a crack last time out. 

i went searching tonight and after getting through his cake wax job i found a large crack and went in deeper. ended up stripping out a strip of paulownia and found the filler has eaten the foam below leaving a void, could get my fingers in under the other timber pieces, hence this is why i think it failed. i know you guys may not know to much about kite surfboards but its not a million miles away. any ideas? wrong epoxy or foam identification?

cheers

sean b

2

that is righteously effed for the both of you

if the whole was big and the epoxy batch large, a meltdown is what happened

epoxy in itself does not eat the eps, but the heat of the reaction does

fill with foam, not epoxy, fair with epoxy/glass bubble mix, glass, vacuum wood on, glass, fillcoat, etc etc

boardlady.com lays it all out for you

cheers

wouter c

 

3

Yep, sounds like your epoxy mix got too hot and melted the foam. Like wouter said, fill the void with foam instead, then proceed from there.

Boardlady

4

when you use filler in a thick coat it will get really hot and can melt the foam,( the thicker the caot the hotter it will get, the thinner it is it will kick off alot cooler) it happens alot when doing fcs plugs, so try to either do several thin layers of resin or just fill the hole with some foam and glass it or maybe its just some really wierd resin, good luck

5

guys, cheers.

i forgot about the heat from the epoxy, yeah must have been that.

 

sean b