YOU ARE PROBABLY USING THE WRONG RESIN! Fiberglass resin Selection Guide & What to Know (2024)

Welcome to our Channel everyone my name is Joe buskins this is our family's boat shop today the episode's going to be all about fiberglass resin selection there can be a whole world of resins to select from out there and you're going to want to choose the right one for your project so today just a real quick overview look on the table behind us we've got from fiberglass Warehouse here we have the dcpd ortho blend then we're going to the orthop polyester and that's a laminating resin then we've got the iso tooling which is also a polyester a vinylester laminating which is one of my favorites and then we've got an epoxy on board today so we're going to do a full spectrum of basically I'm going to walk through the pros and cons of each of those we're going to actually mix up a little batch of each and show you how well it wets out the 1708 and then we actually laminated some pieces of 1708 with each one of these AED cins several days ago and we are actually going to do just a bit of a stress test just kind of a good old boat shop I want to bend them and flex them and see how much abuse they'll take and kind of just give you my general feedback on those so first off I'm going to put on um you know the good old latex gloves a little bit of PPE is a good idea and what I want to do is talk about each one of these in depth maybe some of the pros and cons why you might want to use them on your next project and their proper application so the first one we're going to be talking about is the dcpd ortho blend now this is a resin you are probably going to find a lot of times when you go to your local auto part store or your uh boat repair local Warehouse that is probably going to be one of the resins they're going to have and most of these resins to me you're looking at kind of the from least to most as as far as strength and cost is the way we've got this table set up now there are a lot of production boats that are built out of dcpd blend resins um we don't personally use them very much because when they cure they dry very hard and Slick almost with a waxy film on the surface and when we're building a boat or a project is going to go on for quite some time we like a resin that stays sticky or tacky which would be more of like a laminating resin now now the ortho dcpd blend would be fine if you're doing just a smaller patch or repair maybe something Automotive or something um in a shower Basin or something like that um a couple of its advantages are though it's readily available the cost is fairly low and it doesn't shrink very much when it cures so it's got fairly good cosmetic properties um as we move over into the next tier of resins we've got the ortho or it's also known as Ortho falic polyester and this is a laminating resin which again it stays tacky or sticky after you've given it some time to cure it'll still feel like it's not fully cured but it's meant to be that way that is so that when you come back if it's even the following weekend and you want to add more layers of fiberglass you're not going to have any issues with subsequent layers of glass glass or resin sticking to it you don't even need to sand it whereas the dcpd you would want to sand that pretty aggressively if it's had any amount of time to cure and if you're curious what your boat is built out of I would say probably 90 to 95% of all boats that are on the market today are going to be built out of an orthop polyester laminating resin and this would be if you went to more of your one of your bigger wholesale ERS or one of your more popular more common resins that would be used uh in boat production again the cost is a little bit higher maybe than the dcpds but um it's going to stay nice and tacky it's got a little better bonding characteristics in my opinion and a lot of folks are going to use something like this just for your general laminating and repair now as we move up we've got an ISO tooling polyester and the iso stand stands for ISO falic and it is moving up the food chain even a little bit further and that is actually what we built our 29 out of and you'll notice the designation here tooling that would be talking about building molds or forms and one of the reasons this is good for that is it's again a low shrink resin so when it cures it doesn't move or distort very much it's got really good bonding characteristics and and all of our demos like if you guys watch some of our how to fiberglass over ply wood like in this sample piece this video that we did this sample piece went real big uh fiberglassing over plywood we were using a very decent quality ISO falic resin in that application again a little more expensive but just got better overall properties as far as um just quality of the resin it's just it's just good stuff but you're still in the polyester family now a resin that you guys seen me use some fillers and putties that touch on vinyl Esters um vinyl Esters are kind of neat in that they blend some characteristics of epoxy and some characteristics of your polyesters and this is a really really cool again this is from fiberglass Warehouse which we're really happy we found someone that we can recommend to you guys if you're looking for some smaller quantities cuz previously we were getting this stuff in Big Bolt container ERS like 5 gallon and 55 gallon drums and containers but vinyl Esters are going to bond aggressively to a pretty broad range of materials they've got really good waterproofing qualities and really good elongation properties meaning it's instead of getting hard and brittle it's going to stay more flexible which on a boat that's a great thing because boats are going to flex and twist even RVs and some other things I mean most things we're going to be working on there's going to be flex and twist there and if you got something that's too hard and brittle it'll crack and fail whereas something that can flex and move that's a really good thing but one of the huge things that I really like about it is that you can use gel coat or for our folks overseas flow coat will will bond just fine to VI vinyl lesters um no problem whatsoever with bonding issues unlock like with epoxies typically I do not recommend using a polyester resin or gel coat over epoxy resins so if you're looking for something that's going to be super strong block water Bond aggressively vinylester is definitely something you're going to want to look at now epoxies we've talked about a bunch seems like a lot of you guys out there that are the diyes use a lot of epoxy one of the reasons I think you see it and a lot of stores is because there's a very long shelf life with epoxy resins they last a long long time now sometimes the Catalyst itself will go bad a little bit early and you'll get some discoloration but overall you're going to get a really long shelf life it's going to bond to a very broad range of materials and it's very good at waterproofing but the likelihood of your boat being built out of epoxy is almost zero very few boats are built out of it it's used mostly by boat builders in special applications where you're trying to bond a hardware down or you're really sealing and waterproofing something and one of the reasons is it's because it's the most expensive it seems like epoxies tend to run around $100 a gallon for the most part so what I'm going to do I'm going to catalyze some of this resin now folks and we're using the good old the norox 925 this is also known as me AP or methyl ethyl Ketone peroxide and you guys if you're following the channel seeing some of our stuff I like to add a little bit of the red dye to our Catalyst and we're using one of little squeeze bottles and then that way we can see when we have thoroughly mixed our our Catalyst into our resin so generally speaking you're going to need about 10 or 12 drops per ounce and that's about what we've got here is about an ounce and I'm going to win it a little bit I'm going to see let's see here H come on that's probably good a little bit in each one we should be good there that might be a little on the hot side always want to wear eye protection folks and you'll notice I'm using the mekp on everything that's polyester and vinylester and you'll can see one reason I like the dyed catalyst is you can see when it has been thoroughly mixed now a lot of companies recommend about 2 minutes of mix time especially for your epoxies same deal and if you guys now this is a good time to ask you folks if you're enjoying and you appreciate the effort we've been putting into these videos you can hit that that like button give me the thumbs up that really tells the YouTube algorithm we're doing a good job and if you want to share this video if you have other social platforms that you frequently use and you think there are other friends and family and other boers out there we want to do more of this and as the channel grows we can do more of it now is also a good time to thank everyone for your support the channel has been really really growing it's because of you guys and the more you guys watch the more this stuff I can do so thank you from the bottom of my heart I really really appreciate you guys taking the time to check out the Channel all right so as soon as all of these are mixed we're going to do a little wet out and then like I said we are going to follow up and I'm going to put some of these sample pieces we made the other day through their Paces now this is a 4:1 epoxy we've got the hardener here in the background and what I've done I went ahead head and poured up a couple ounces there and we're going to bring it up from two to the 2 and 1/2 o Mark and about there should be right now one of the pros of epoxy for a lot of people is that it doesn't smell as strongly as the polyesters and vinyl Esters they have a stronger smell and that is because they are vinyl they are styrene is the solvent used within those so um I'm going to mix these just a moment usually again about 2 minutes on the mix time for these is going to be the way to go and then I'm immediately going to jump right back I'm going to let these stand for a second and we're going to start wetting some of this stuff some of this stuff out a little bit all right so here we go folks we're going now with the dcpd ortho blend and I want to show you guys my cameraman can zoom in a bit there and I've got a bit of wax paper underneath there and we're just going to saturate that and let you guys get an idea of how well this material takes the resin and the time it takes to get it saturated is relatively quick now that is one of the things I have noticed personally is that most of your polyester and vinyl Esters tend to wet out a little easier than your epoxy a lot of times your epoxy is going to be a little thicker in nature yeah Zoom right in there man give you guys a bird's eye view up close and personal there that orthop polyester wets out really nice and again this is what most boats are built out of high likelihood that is what here goes with the iso this is what our 29 is built out of very good material covers a broad spectrum applications we're just using a brush obviously you guys have seen me use a 3/8 snap roller and then a lot of times afterward you may want to use a little small fin roller to work out the air bubbles and folks we're also trying to do a much better job of adding links below the description of the video and then that way any of the materials that we're using today if you guys want to use some of them or order some directly you should be able to find where to get it below the videos all right here we go with the vinyl luster you see these are all slightly different colors viny Lester's good stuff man it's a neat resin that I just don't think a lot of people are aware of and I think once you've used it there's a high likelihood that's going to become one of your go-to go-to materials yeah there you go very nice and if you're new to fiberglassing many times you can put some of this resin in the lamin it and let it stand or sit for just a few moments and it'll kind of draw in there it'll soften up some of the binders in the material and you're going to get better saturation if you just give it a moment and then sometimes we'll come back with a little more material all right here we go with our epoxy and all of these are good materials they have a place they each have an application sometimes when people ask what is the best resin it's just hard hard to say I often think if you were thinking of say Metals For example aluminum is great there's an application for it in the marine environment in stainless steel is really great and you think even in the aircraft world like titanium for example but there's times when you could not justify even if titanium is lighter and stronger than the other materials the cost would make it prohibitive in some application so even though it's really really good you may not always want to use or have to use what is the most expensive so here we go you can see that everything is wet out they all wet out very nicely the epoxy is a little bit thicker there and it seems like it takes a just a moment more for it to um to penetrate or saturate but let's start back here with the dcpd now again folks we laminated some 1708 so from the same roll same batch all the same materials and I'm just kind of curious as far as flexibility youve got good flexibility starting to hear a little cracking there when we really roll into it and I'm just going to put it under a load and see I mean it's taking quite a bit look at this guys I mean that is taken I'm actually surprised by that it's quite resilient even now the glass fibers are so even though you got a b line there between it that held up actually quite well so that's the DC PD Ortho blend now let's go again we've got the straight Ortho laminating resin just kind of a similar deal we'll fold it back on itself this feels a little tougher if you guys can see it's it's putting up a lot of resistance here we go I mean but man the the mount anything you guys build that would be a lot of stress that's actually quite good too I'm pretty overall pretty pleased and and most of the time you know if you're building a boat like the bottom of our 29 there are 10 layers of bi axial material on the bottom so it gets exponentially stronger this is going to be your ISO it's stronger yet that's taking more that's taking more finger and hand strength to get it to bend there we go all of these though are holding together surprisingly well it's taking a lot of force to really do any damage all right so we're moving up into the vinyl the vinyl eser all right there we go that's taking a good bit of power to damage as well but you can see we don't we don't have failure even with bending it back on itself completely and then we've got the epoxy this is uh there are Brands out there that are very very popular epoxy's tough but then it on the back that's interesting it took a lot to bend it initially but then we got a little bit more fracturing than some of the others after working at back and forth a bit so you know what it's interesting folks pretty similar in the way all of these behaved even when you bent them back on themselves and work them back and forth you know the material still wants to stay intact um now maybe I could do that's a pretty a basic test just so you guys can see with your own eyes I don't have any real fancy laboratory equipment here maybe down the road just like we did with some of our cusa stress tests maybe we'll do something more elaborate or figure out something that um maybe would answer some of yall's questions or maybe you have some suggestions or ideas of ways um I would like to glue something together with these different resins and just test shearing them apart and separating but let me know what you guys think and let me know if you enjoyed again guys your support means everything to us it helps the channel to move forward and grow and again we want to do more of this but right now we've got our Charter season starting just right around the corner and we're trying to find the balance here with you guys making videos and spending time out on the water but um it's Captain Joe here with Island Marine Charters fish bump TV here on YouTube my fantastic cameraman working hard behind the scenes there and as always we will catch you guys next time [Music] out che che che [Music] che

Channel: Fish Bump TV

Views: 21,811

Keywords: alexseal marine paint, alexseal paint, boat building, boat stringers, chipped gelcoat, epoxy, fiberglass prep, fish bump tv, gelcoat or paint for boat, how to apply gelcoat to fiberglass, how to do fiberglass repair on a boat, how to fix chipped gelcoat, how to repair fiberglass boat transom, how to restore gelcoat on fiberglass boat, marine epoxy, prepping fiberglass for gelcoat, transom replacement, val castor, gelcoat color, fiberglass resin, boatworks today, totalboat

Id: 0D1NFhFmew0

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024