homemade

[jonesg]

After doing my transom I made up some homemade seacast.
It uses bpo catalyst, thats the red stuff sold for bondo resin.
Take unwaxed poly resin and thix it til its like mud, add the bpo in recommended amount on the tube then chop strand or chopped matt and thats it. The bpo catalyst slows the resin down and makes it possible to do deep moldings without excessive heat. The resin must be thickened before adding the bpo, promoted as they term it.

I tried it with unthixed resin and it didn't work, it didn't set firm even when cooked with a heat gun.

This mix has to be encased in glass as a core, as it has a sort of cakey? texture in comparison to regular glassing. Its tough but lacks certain strengths that regular layups have. Yeh you can belt it with a hammer but it can't flex like glasswork does.

But if anyone is curious, ace hardware sells the bpo in tubes.

Usually adding cabosil and fiber to a gallon regular resin will produce fireworks in 5 minutes but I got over 45 minutes work time with this mix.

It can be used in place of wood stringers, I don't know what else to do with the stuff. Seems heavy for most things.

 

[ondarvr]

Re: homemade

The thing you need to be carful with is making sure the resin you use will react with BPO. DMA is used to promote most resins and it's what reacts with the BPO, so the level of DMA needs to be sufficient enough to cure the resin. Some putties are designed to be use with either MEKP or BPO (duel promoted) and with BPO you can typically get a faster cure, resins don't always have enough DMA and this may result in a slow and undercured laminate. Thicker castings like a transom will generate more heat, so it will cure better even if the reaction is slow.

Always test it first.