You look down and find that the worst has happened: you just glued your fingers together while being handy at home. Everyone uses glue, but most are limited to the standard Elmer’s or Super Glue. This blog will focus on eight diverse adhesives I have experience using in the past, and explore each of their properties and how they are underappreciated due to obscurity.
This first PAS blog post will focus on epoxy, one of my favorite ways to make two pieces one.
Epoxy comes in many forms but usually consists in two parts. The first is the synthetic resin, and the second is the catalyst, or “hardener.” These parts are kept separate, and when mixed in certain ratios, the hardener helps the resin to polymerize and form an unbelievably strong bond with almost any material.
Epoxy is extremely versatile given different chemical formulas of the resin and hardener. Cure times can range from 1 minute to 72 hours, and it can be as thin as hot honey to as thick as a moldable clay. You can find epoxy in some form everywhere, coating floors in cafeterias, laminating wood strips, or can be combined with a knit material, such as carbon fiber, to make a new sheet material or stiff molded parts.
With great versatility comes great responsibility. Epoxy has very specific curing conditions that must be met. The mixing of hardener and resin must be done thoroughly to ensure a strong bond is formed, and you must mix it in a non reactive, high melting point container, as the epoxy becomes so hot in mixing that it can melt through most plastic cups. Heat is added in projects where the epoxy is supposed to dry clear, so that bubbles in the resin can escape, but overheating results in immediate reaction of all the epoxy and can ruin a project or cause a fire. For the same reason, in deep slow-cure epoxy pours, there must be controlled ventilation to ensure the epoxy does not harden too quickly.
My favorite use of epoxy I have seen is in making deep pour epoxy tables out of wood. It is a beautiful mix of new and old material to make a strongly bonded, beautiful table or desk, with sections being several inches thick of clear or dyed epoxy.
Although scary at times and impossible to work with, I look at projects such as the one shown above, and am amazed at the creative ways epoxy can be mixed with other materials to make a a greater whole. The next time you go out to buy Super Glue, drop the bottle and pick up the two, the two parts of epoxy resin.
Links:
https://www.britannica.com/science/epoxy-resin
Michael this post was very interesting, and I am excited to read more posts like this in the future. Prior to this post, I had no idea what epoxy was, but now I feel like an expert. I think the table that you showed at the end was very cool looking, and I can see why it would be fun to make one of these tables yourself.
Hi Michael! I thought your post was not only interesting but very educational. I loved how you explained the different properties of epoxy and the different materials used to create it!
I was really excited to see this post! I’ve never worked with epoxy but am totally fascinated by the different uses — especially pieces like the picture of the table you included. I am, admittedly, a little afraid to actually use epoxy because of how finicky it is, but I think I may have just been convinced to use it.
This post was really interesting, I learned a lot more about epoxy and its different uses. I’ve actually used epoxy for one of my school projects where we had to polish a wooden plant-holding structure, and it did the job very well. However, I can definitely agree to the point that epoxy can be difficult to use if not handled properly and in a timely manner.