Instantly Cured Epoxy
George VondriskaEpoxy can fill a lot of voids in your shop, literally, and it offers a lot of benefits you can take advantage of in your shop. One downside...most epoxies take a while to cure; as much as a few days or a week. Ain't got time for that. Meet UV cured epoxy! It cures instantly under UV light.
What??
This is amazing stuff. Instead of waiting days for the epoxy to cure you only have to wait minutes. The product being used is Total Boat UV Resin. It's available in a bunch of different colors, along with clear.
Any downsides?
This stuff works very well. Its only real downside is that it has to be applied in thin layers. Truthfully that's not much of a downside because it cures so fast. Just build the layers as you go.
What UV source works?
Any source of UV light will cure this stuff. That could be as simple as setting the project in the sun. A UV source in your shop, like a UV flashlight, will probably be more convenient. As you work with it keep in mind that it's UV cure. If you have a lot of natural light in your shop this stuff could be curing as you apply it, which may or may not be what you want. In most cases it's best to shade out the natural sunlight while you're working, then expose it to UV when you're ready.
As far as the category of cool stuff I have found out about that I think you should know about, the cool stuff is UV resin. This is epoxy. You don't have to mix it up. We're gonna get the cure from this with UV light. Instead of waiting days and days, we're gonna wait a minute and a half.
So here's what we've got going. It's available in a bunch of different forms. So you can get it in colors, you can get it in glitter, you can get it clear. Think of it a little bit like CA glue, but CA glue that offers more, because we've got colors and everything else going with it. It's best used in thin layers.
So this isn't something where this crack in this board would get filled with this product, unless you wanted to do it in uber, uber thin layers. But something like that little hole, that's a great candidate for couple of drops of epoxy. Then, with the light, in the case of this particular one, there are settings on the top, and that's duration of exposure. So with the amount of epoxy I just put down there, I'm gonna give it full exposure, 150 seconds. So that light is on.
Now we just let that sit. So it's just like a two-part epoxy you would mix, it has those same attributes, except that it's UV cured. So in that 150 seconds, that's ready to go. So a couple things here. One would be just a case like this, where I need to fill that sa- small spot, get this ready for the next step, finishing or a tabletop epoxy, whatever it is, and I can do that immediately, have it cured, without waiting the two or three days or more that a conventional two-part epoxy would take.
Also, if you're doing epoxy work and you find that you have a little bit of a leak someplace, so maybe you're doing a deeper pour, one of the dams isn't holding, you could use the UV-cured resin, UV-cured epoxy, get a drop in there, UV flash it, and then hopefully seal that leak up. So it's definitely worth knowing about. It's got a lot of different, spots in your shop, I think, that it could fit into. And because it's UV cured, it's instant, and I don't know, in my world, instant is often good.
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