The Wonders of Epoxy

Building a house seems easy now in comparison to building the interiors of a bus.  The walls of a house are straight for the most part.  The bus is more like a ship in that a cross section every 18" will change. Heck, it changes more quickly than that in some places!  

We came across a bad-looking detail when we built out the first overhead cabinets.  At the obtuse intersection between two panels was a gaping void.   

Just in order to glue the panels together, we had to first clamp one panel to create
a grabbing surface for the second clamp.

Do you think anyone will notice?

Yikes!

I immediately thought that I could create some wood piece to fill it in.  Michael had a better idea:  E P O X Y !

He took a class recently in Orlando in which he learned about epoxy, resin, fiberglass, etc.  It was meant to assist him with his future plans of making a plane.  It came in handy with our F-ed up corner. 

Thank goodness Michael loves to teach me the new skills he learns.  It turns out that epoxy is pretty simple to use!  West Marine has these spouts that dispense the right proportions of the liquid that you need.  They had this expensive filler material that I noticed looked just like sawdust.  So guess what we did for our filler - we collected sawdust from our tablesaw and used that free material instead!  We might be able to be the first LEED-certified bus in the world!

Application was very easy, much to my surprise.  The last time we had worked with epoxy was when we were attempting to waterproof a plywood box to attempt making our own water tanks.  The trick this time was to use a delayed hardener (keep your lewd comments to yourself!) liquid so you have time to apply the mixture and to mold it in place.  We waited 2 hours for our mix to harden.  When we had used the hardener from Home Depot, we had about 30 minutes tops.  

The next step was to sand.  We used a 60-grit on a belt sander and an 80-grit on an orbital sander at the top where the former could not reach.  

Still ugly, but on it's way to beautiful!

Void filled!

Next step ... paint!

This was so much easier than finding a scrap piece of wood, cutting it on a router, filling it in the holes, waiting for the filler to dry, sanding and then painting.  Epoxy is the way to go!