Battens

Today the temperatures got well into the high twenties so it was an excellent opportunity to put the fast epoxy to work by bonding the scarfed battens. It was a pretty tedious operations having to make 130 ml batches and try to make 3 battens at a time. In order to use a single pair of clamping jigs I stapple gunned the joints and carefully moved them over to free the clamping jigs for the next batten bonding operation. I was afraid the joints might move and ruin the whole job but everything worked out just fine.
It's amazing the way the learning curve evolves along the process. The first batten must have taken me about 45 minutes to set up and bond, while at the end I could easely do three battens in about 30 minutes.
In fact the first bonding operation had to be done over because of a wrong resin/hardener ratio. The thing wouldn't simply cure! It turned out that the stapples where a bit off mid section of the scarf so it was a good opportunity to fix up this problem too.

This was the first contact with the resin and it was a good opportunity to calibrate the batches for maximum resin rentability.
I was afraid it could become a bit messy but it all come out nice and clean. In fact never had to put the nitril gloves on.
At the end used some left over resin to seal the boundaries of the mdf form frames. I noticed that some srews were sweling up the borders.

I will be planning in advance some side operations where I can always use excess resin and or glass. Maybe I'll make some custom tools to use later on in the lamination process.