I am using VE Infusion resin from Composite Envisions - Can't remember who makes it for them but it does seem to have a nice balance of promoters and inhibitors - and the viscosity is 100 cp (pretty much like water). That’s much better than laminating (and most ‘thin’) resins which are in the 600-700 range. Since my garage gets fairly cool at night, I think my resin stays about 55-65 until I start messing with it. That probably helps on gel time but increases viscosity. Since the humidity is pretty low it really does not take much for me to crank the garage up to 90 this time of year. When it starts at 35 and is below 20 outside I can get it just over 70 in an hour or two. If I’m doing this too late in the fall I should probably get an LEL meter before cranking up the propane heater in there.
I picked that layup schedule for a few reasons:
I got a bunch of the materials (glass and core) cheap.
It is really strong in most directions and pretty light
The ¾ core takes up some of the potter putty space and gives the whole deck positive buoyancy; including core, resin, and glass the layup is about 36-37 lbs/ft3.
I am treating the top layers as almost sacrificial; I have seen a lot of things dropped on decks and destroy the top skin into cores and the twill and top 1808 should protect the other layers from damage. Also, with this layup schedule it shouldn’t matter if something damages it from a strength perspective and it should be easy to fix. Based on my numbers it actually weighs slightly less than the original decks new and lots less than the soggy mess I took out.
It would have been nice to get 1800 and some continuous fiber mat (CFM) instead of the 1808 but that didn’t fall into my lap. CFM is supposed to flow much better than CSM – I think it uses less or no binder and binder inhibits flow. I can definitely see that the CSM on the 1808 slows down the flow. I wanted some sort of mat to prevent the print through from the biax though.
I would love to have access to long extrusion pieces like that. Seems like if you used pegboard as a template for drilling some backer board you could glue it together without any air bubble high spots.
I took a pic of the surface of the cured layup and one of the matching corner I pulled it off of; you can really see how the wrinkles in the Teflon set the layup.
The 'bottom' of the layup (which was actually up during infusion) is much smoother - I think I could just gelcoat it and get an ok surface.
I re-watched the Metan videos today and noticed some things they do different than I do – some make sense and some seem like a Ford vs. Chevy thing. Gotta think about it some more but really good to watch again. Seems like they skipped over some really important details but they probably don’t want to educate the competition and they really did not have the time; promo video vs. step-by-step educational.