On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:33:55 -0700, you wrote: >On Mon, 2013-09-30 at 18:23 -0600, Gregg Eshelman wrote: >> How about trying a different resin? Call Smooth-On and see if they have >> any recommendations that may fit your needs. >> >> Or perhaps an epoxy might work better? There are many manufacturers of >> those. One that looks like they have some interesting products is West >> Systems. > >West Systems is well thought of in the boating world. >Nice easy ratio for catalyzing. Fairly long open times.
I've used West epoxy resins quite a bit, both lay up and vacuum bagged. It works very well and there is extensive help and documentation on their web site. It's a lay up resin, not a casting resin. If you mix a paper cup of the stuff and leave it, it gets so hot it will burn the cup and catch fire - done it :) A friend of mine has a molding company and they use West epoxy a lot. Bubbles, if introduced are by poor mixing technique or out gassing from the mold. Epoxy gets hot as it cures, any air or moisture in the mold material will cause bubbles in the finish as it heats up during curing. Resin based molds should be post cured during their manufacturing process to a higher temperature than the curing temperature of the resin otherwise the mold will distort. His epoxy moldings are oven cured at 60C low vacuum (5lbs), some of the aerospace and automotive carbon fibre work he does is at 150C + and high vacuum. Having said that West epoxy also cures fine at room temperatures, just takes longer. Steve Blackmore -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134791&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
