Overlapping overlaps with glass

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pee wee
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Re: Overlapping overlaps with glass

Post by pee wee »

I don't know it for a fact, but I'd imagine that you get some health damaging fumes off epoxy when heating it like that- protect yourself! :wink:
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cracked_ribs
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Re: Overlapping overlaps with glass

Post by cracked_ribs »

fallguy1000 wrote: Mon Nov 01, 2021 12:31 am I am a heat gun varnish on wood stripping expert. Where I had trouble was 1708 tapes that were curing slow and I tried to warm the tape for like a pass of the gun no stopping and it burned, so maybe you are onto something there with styrene..
That I could see for sure. The glass itself of course isn't going to be harmed by the heat - once in a while a coring from a bulkhead accidentally makes it into the burn barrel here, and I know about it afterwards because I get a perfect hole-saw cut of glass fabric on the bottom of the wood stove. I have a few in front of the stove I haven't swept up yet right now, actually. It comes out totally pristine. That's been up to radically higher temperatures than you'd ever do with a heat gun, unless you really, really hated your boat I guess. So the glass itself: unharmed. But binding agents on the glass? No idea about what temperatures they tolerate.

I also don't generally preheat glass as much as get a thin spread of epoxy on it, often too cold to saturate well, then run the gun over afterwards. So potentially there's an effect there like the way you can boil water in a paper bag at temperatures that would cause an empty bag to ignite. The medium may reduce the temperature of the glass fabric. Not sure, just a guess. But the changing viscosity of the epoxy is how I track the temperature anywhere I don't have my gloved hand on the piece as I go, so I think running on dry fabric would be riskier.

But I have never tried it on mat, precisely because I would be worried about how the binders would react.

I definitely agree that sucking in a lot of those fumes probably isn't great. I have pretty good airway protection on hand and even so...I like an open garage door and a big fan when I'm doing a lot of heating.

I was thinking about it last night and another one of the uses I first put a heat gun to was smoothing out neat coats on bright finish stuff. I found I could control the surface well and any tiny bubbles that got worked in would pop out as the mix thinned. So that may be another reason I have always treated it as something you aim at the epoxy more than the glass: that's just how I happened to start using it.

Anyway it's not my position that it's a risk-free all purpose magic bullet or anything. It's just a tool I use a lot and find effective.
I designed my own boat. This is the build thread:

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