Saturday, October 15, 2011

Day 38.1 - Update

A brief update for tonight. As you'll recall I brought the resin home to put in hot water to decrystallize. I'm doing this by putting the five gallon plastic cube container in an ice chest and adding hot water (about 160 degrees) After about an hour I finally got the nozzle off the top and surprise! There's what looks like an iceberg inside! I had been wondering why the level of fluid in the resin container was going down faster proportionally than the hardener container; now I know why. That huge crystal inside was throwing things off. As a consequence of this I didn't go over to the shed until later tonight.

I'm glad I did as the peanut butter in the scarf that had squeezed out was just hard enough to cleanly separate from the plywood, but pliable enough to stay together and come off as once piece.

When I got home I found the crystallized resin had all reverted back to a liquid, but I drained most of the water and added more hot. The rule of thumb is once you get back to liquid you need to keep it at at least 120 degrees for a couple hours to get rid of the micro-crystals that you can't see but that will restart the crystallization process again.