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wetting out fabrics
Posted by: YankeeSnowman on Nov-06-12 9:00 AM (EST)
I started the cloth patches last night. I did the fiberglass on the outside first, using one layer as recommended above. It went reasonably well but I have a couple of questions:
1. The GFlex is pretty viscous and doesn't wet out the s-glass as easily as I had imagined. Should I warm it up beyond room temperature to get it to flow better?
2. I used very sharp sewing scissors for the s-glass and it cut easily but I kept losing fibers from the edges so the net result was that the edges tended to have fibers in one direction. This was made slightly worse each time I scraped the viscous epoxy towards and edge. How do I minimize this?
3. I was planning to use the same scissors for the kevlar, which I think is generally a no-no. However, I don't plan on doing this very often and my wife hasn't noticed that I took her fancy sewing scissors yet.
4. I'm doing this in my unheated shed. I have a closed-system space-heater that I've put next to the repair. I've hung a thermometer from the rafters and in the general vicinity of the repair it stayed above 60 last night, despite outside temps of 25. It was still a bit tacky this morning so I left the heater on for the day, too. The GFlex says it will still cure down to 40, so I think I'm okay, even though it was tacky today.
5. Should I consider putting another layer of just epoxy over the s-glass patch once the first is all dry? This will allow me to feather out the edges a bit better without disrupting the edges of the s-glass itself, I think.
I'm planning to do the kevlar on the inside tonight, so any thoughts on these questions would be helpful!
thanks for the ongoing help, everyone...