Okay, I was cleaning my garage the other day and a tool struck me as maybe having a cool use for eps construction. It was a wallpaper removal tool, it’s basically this palm sized thing that you rub all over your wallpaper, and it puts tiny little holes into the paper so that the remover can get behind the paper faster, and make the paper peal easier (It worked too!). I was thinking, after sealing the blank, I personally use spackling because I don’t see a problem with it as I’ve talked to Greg and he has done thousands of boards without issue, you could run this thing over your entire board, and leave little punctures, just tiny needle point sized, all over the entire surface of the board, top and bottom, and when you glass it, small amounts of glass would seep into these holes and become like little anchors, making the board stronger (although it may be marginally), yet keeping the epoxy from just soaking into the blank like it’s being sucked up like a sponge. Thoughts?
I was under the impression that if your spackle layer is thin enough after sanding, that the epoxy used for laminating would saturate the spacke and a small amount would get down to the eps, bonding everything together.
Let us know if you try it, it sounds like good insurance against any possible delams if the spackle on too thick…
JSS
Well, how I spackle is to roll it on with a firm (thin) paint roller (thinned down of course) and then scrape the whole thing with a plastic scraper, so it only leaves a very thin layer, but I just had the idea for insurance.
Try it!
I’ve been thinking about this… you can do it with test panels or boards…
Weigh the spackled blank before lamination, and then again after. Figure out the percentage of weight increase.
Next board, do the same thing, and use the wallpaper removal tool.
The difference in percentage increase should be a function of resin absorbed by the blank, if you’ve got the techique down and you’re consistent enough to get accurate results. All the other variables have to be constant, of course, including temperature, foam density… You can’t really do the same thing using volume of resin, because you can’t accurately measure what’s on the floor.