Re: Fixing Fiberglass

Posted by Nolan on January 03, 2002 at 04:42:43 from (209.48.190.220):

In Reply to: Fixing Fiberglass posted by mike christian on January 02, 2002 at 18:31:46:

Do a search on fiberglass boat repair and fiberglass boat building and you will learn more then you ever wanted to know about it. :-)

That said, there are two main families of resin, epoxy and polyester. Your hood was almost undoubtably built with polyester.

Polyester is the classic jelly like stuff in the auto repair stores. It's cheap, and that's it claim to fame. It smells, is hard to work with, not waterproof, not UV stable, and not terribly strong. But boy is it cheap.

Epoxy on the other hand is expensive. It's also easy to work with, strong, waterproof, UV stable and doesn't smell. It's also 4 to 10 times as expensive as Polyester resin. This stuff starts out pouring like motor oil. You have to mix various thickeners in it if you want to a different viscosity. And those thickeners all affect the strength various ways.

When you're doing polyester, you goo the jell everywhere and try your best to smash the fiberglass through it to wet it out. With epoxy, you brush the liquid epoxy on, even right over the dry cloth you hold in place.

Then there's the fiberglass. Two main things you'll run into; mat and cloth.

Cloth is woven, just like cloth. No need to get into the various weaves and such because you're not building a boat. Thick stranded cloths build up faster then many layers of thinner cloth, but are not as strong. That said, it's very easy to screw up many layers of cloth, getting way to much epoxy in there, and end up weaker then if you'd have used less layers of thick cloth.

Mat is just fiberglass felt. Great for build up, so so on strength. Cloth is far stronger, but only in the direction the fibers go. On a diagnal, cloth and mat are about equal in strength.

Mat goes around bends, especially compound bends, far easier then cloth does.

That should be enough now to have your eyeballs rolling back in their sockets. :-)

Let me know if you really want to get talking about this, as I've done some boat building before.

Follow Ups:

• Re: Re: Fixing Fiberglass Bus Driver 17:11:35 01/03/02 (0)
• Re: Re: Fixing Fiberglass John - NY 09:04:37 01/03/02 (0)

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