Trailer Repairs - More Adhesive Product Education

I spent 3 hours on the trailer today and have very little to show for it. Except that some new pieces of information are now located in my brain.

Maybe I should have known this one, but if I did, I had forgotten. The shelf life of fiberglass resin hardener is only 6-8 months. It's the stuff in the little squeeze tube. You put in one drop of this to every 0.1 ounce of the resin, then mix and use it to bond the fiberglass cloth to the surface. Only, if the hardener is old... it never hardens. My two little braces were lying on the countertop in a sticky mess of unhardened resin this morning. Solution... new hardener. Those are now attached yet again. Hopefully, tomorrow they will be tight and dry.

The next bit of adhesive information involves removal. The Loc-tite Ultra peels off the fiberglass easily. However, there are two strips of wood running the length of the trailer that the previous owner added to hold various things, and I left them in place because they were useful to me as well. Loc-tite sticks to wood very well. Some of the stringy blobs of adhesive peeled off pretty well, but most did not. Scraping them off wasn't very satisfactory either. It left a bumpy film that wasn't going to be a good surface for gluing to.

I looked up how to remove Loc-tite. This is one solution, and it worked well for me. Blast it with a heat gun and scrape it while it's hot. I couldn't hold both the heat gun and the scraper and take a picture, but you get the idea.

This got most of it off, and then I wiped the final residue with acetone, and that got it clean and smooth enough to glue to again.

However, I learned another thing about working with the polyethylene foam. You don't want to let the direct heat of the heat gun hit it! See how it shrank? This location doesn't matter, so I'm glad I learned that lesson where it makes no difference. That arc of damage is from waving the heat gun at it. I'll be sure to remove the rest of the glue residue before I have polyethylene foam anywhere near it.

No picture, but I also learned that you can clean drips of soft fiberglass resin and/or glue off the epoxy resin countertop with acetone, and it will not damage that surface.

The only thing I managed that looks like progress was to get the middle of the kitchen ceiling ready for the finish layer. I did the inside layer of this with the new Helmistik 1685 spray glue. I did learn that the nozzle of that gets a little clogged. I'll try to clean that with a pin next time I use it. Tomorrow may be a serious rain day which would hamper the trailer progress. The far section of the kitchen ceiling is again waiting for those two little braces to dry.

It turned out to be a beautiful day! I had to go to the store to get the resin hardener, so I also returned the gallon of contact cement and found another piece of the trim strip I need to support the kitchen cupboard. I had hunted unsuccessfully for it the other day. Today, the store employees seemed to have no idea even though I had found a small scrap to show them what I was looking for. But, one guy helped hunt, and, yup! After we looked all the places I had searched, there was one more display of trim pieces I hadn't previously found, and there it was. However, I have to say that when you actually have a sample in your hand and the "helpers" in the store look at it blankly and can't come up with what it is, my confidence is not inspired. (The answer to the question is- PVC screen molding. Now I won't forget, at any rate.)

On the way home, I stopped to take one great autumn photo.

In other news, I edited and finished one big volunteer task.

See Battle of the Glues