Hi, Just a little question thats been I my haed for a while, can you mill your own glass for fcs plgs etc?
I thought maybe a coffee grinder or somthing of the like, cutting with scissors just doen’t make it fine enough unless you take ages over it. Anyone got any tips or ideas?
Hey Ned
not sure why you’d want to go to the trouble, all that itching. Its not expensive to buy is it?
Hi fatbaslardass, I’m in the UK too and i can’t seam to get hold of it, or much of it at all the usual suspects. I buy it from Home blown in very small quantitys and sea base just told me the don’t stock it! (they seam to be stocking less and less of everyhing but thats another story). I have piles of off cuts sitting around and thought it would be a good use of a waste material, if a bit of an ichy past time. Do you have a good suppler?
Thanks
Why not use whole cloth, trimmed to size? I personally prefer that to milled fiber. Try it.
Hi, sounds a little crazy but I just put some cut up glass through a centrifugal juicer, and got out a cotton wool type fluff!
Not quite the fine powder I was after at least it will retain alot of the glasses structural quality, haven’t tryed it in a pug yet, thats for tommorow:)
Milled glass soaks up resin which can cause the resin to shrink. Not to mention in makes the resin heavier.
Howzit deanbo, Try mixing the fibers and resin and cover and let it sit over night. It might shrink if you use it before the resin has soaked all the fibers. I’ve never seen it shrink, letting sit also gets rid of the air bubbles.Aloha,Kokua
Just cut up some cloth into 1/8" strips and cut the strips into 1/8" pieces. Put it in the resin and let it soak, catalyze and mix it. You want about the consistency of toothpaste. Put the mixture into the FCS holes about 1/3 the way up, then set and align the plugs. After this cures, fill the remainder with a runny cabosil mix + white pigment. Cut-up cloth is much stronger than milled fiber, but it doesn’t sand well, so that’s why you top it off with a runny filler.
Hey Ned
I just get mine from homeblown too, as you say small quantities but thats all I need. The other suggestions of cutting strips and just chopping it up rather than trying to turn the cloth into powder seems to make better sense to me.
Where abouts in the UK are you?
I hear what you’re saying about Seabase, I much prefer dealing with Homeblown, nice folk down there. Have you used any of their blanks or resin yet? How did you find them?
Thanks for your help! I want to use milled glass because of its strength properties, the tip about soaking the glass sounds good advice along with topping off the last 1/4 of the FCS cavity with cabo sil mix to get a nice finish. I once worked in a model making place making little epoxy castings, and we used a vac chamber to get rid of the gas in the resin so no little air bubbles got into the castings. I have a vac pump and a chamber so i’ll try doing this to the cabosil mix i lay on top just to get things really neet, it may sound a bit fussy but the air bubbles are really anoying and I havent found a method to solve it yet, but I guess a runny cabo sil mix would go part way to solve this any way. All I have to do now is try and get the plugs nice and centred too, which I also find quite tricky too!
Hi, Jase, Im in Falmouth in Cornwall, yer Tris is a good guy. There blanks are fine, have used a few in the past, but I now hot wire my own from polystyrene, to use in sandwich construction.
Depends what your after, Ian Black at Tombstone has some nice looking waterpoof polysyrene blanks if your using epoxy, he says they shape much better than regualr polysyrene. Other than that Home blown or seabase have the rest of the market, oh and if you want bio blanks move virgo in Portreath is the place to get them.
I would NOT put glass cloth in a blender. One, likely it’ll wrap around the blade, seize/overload/overheat the motor, and then you gotta explain to the Mrs. and buy another one.
I do this instead…cut glass at 45 degrees to the weave direction so that each little “thread” is at most 3/16" long. Add to resin, stir. It will entrain some bubbles, ignore them. I call it “mash” and use a bit of it to tack on fins prior to rope, or to put on a patch where some fill is needed, or on irregular surfaces as fill.
I don’t consider that the glass fibers add much strength. As for using it to set fin plugs, the idea that the fibers add strength is ludicrous. Read “crap” if you don’t have your dictionary handy. The strength of a plug install lies in the bond between the plug, resin and surrounding foam. “Making the resin stronger” makes the resin stronger but so what? The weak point is still the bond between resin and foam, and the added fibers do nothing to help that.
Cranky today, it’s because I’m at work and there’s little else to do just now.
Yes You can mill Your own fiber. I found out after putting fiberglass in a mortar and grinding away with a pestle. The one I used was kind of rough stone type mortar and pestle.
If You do this You might end up with some fineground fiberglass at the bottom of the mortar. good luck. Scary stuff fiberglass, wear a tight fitting mask…
Hi Charlie, Cut fibers will reduce the incidence cracking of the filler around fin boxes and plugs from minor impacts. I’ve seen many cases of FCS plugs where the solid resin around them was cracked, but no damage otherwise. Most molded plastic parts are reinforced by the addition of glass fibers which is normally specified as a volume percent. Also, I think that the bond between the plug and the foam being a weak link is a good thing. Repairing a pulled-out plug is easy, fixing a plug that took out most of the rail with it is another story.