Since all the epoxy marketing experts seems to be in this forum I thought I might throw this out.
I need to stabilized some punky/wormy soft wiliwili (hawaiian balsa wood) bits and pieces inorder to drill them out and turn them on a high speed lathe into pen barrels. Its the remains of the dozen or so iolani palace wiliwili tree branches we saved from several years ago so I'm trying to save and use what ever I don't put on the surface of an EPS blank. Most stabilization processes involve an autoclave, high pressure or vacuums and sometype of penetrating acrylic or epoxy solution. Some folks even use a solution of plexiglass chips dissolved in acetone to harden or petrifi spalted soft woods.
Anyway is there a calculation out there as to the effects on kicking of lets say a 70% xylene diluted epoxy mix?
And should you add in the xylene after mixing parts a and b or all togethor?
Also does anyone know who makes the lowest viscosity epoxy on the market before having to add in solvents?
There is some application of this to composite board building as I previously used some low viscosity ResinX epoxies to help with Greenlight bamboo jersey glassing as well as in getting the epoxy or poly finish coats to fall down flat to eliminate brush strokes and bubbles over the cure time but its always a tricky matter of timing so you don't those avalances of resin sliding off the railbands because of miscalculations.
So this led me to this other question that been bugging me for years.
Who's sealing their wood skins before the apply them and how?
there was some talk awhile back (bert rumors I guess) about using some type of penetrating solution (epoxy/acrylic) and an autoclave setup to prebuild the skins ahead of time to reduce the amount of resin absorbtion you normally get doing hand layups over dry balsa.
Silly suggested squeeging a thickened paste onto the outside of a skin prior or applying it on or lamming it after to reduce unneeded resin absorbtion and keeping the weight down on boards with 5mm wood skins and solid wood rails.
when I lift the 2 boards i have from Jarrod (Shwuz) i can do it pretty much with 2 fingers.
Its been ages since I've been able to achieve that kind of weight on any of my compsands,
so again, to seal wood skins do you use
1. a standard wood sanding sealer(lacquer/water based),
2. a ultra thinned out penetrating epoxy solution or,
3. thickened epoxy paste?
Its funny, that in the small object wood turning world, turners defer from epoxy because they can't get the same brilliant polished finish you can get from the application of 6 or more layers of CA glue. I would never envision CA glue as a finish coat on anything, but the pen folks swear by it. Maybe this carries over to other applications of epoxy as well.
Its weird not being able to find application for any of my laminating experience in the finishing of a turned item.
Its also weird and at times frightening to have your work spinning around at 3000 RPM at you while you engage it holding on to a razor sharp blade with your bare hands.
Cutting your planer cord is nothing compared to have your work disintegrate and explode inches from your face. thank goodness for my full face 3m 6400 respirator