Curing Epoxy Resin in the Cold

[Mike Geig]

Howdy, last night I routed a pattern in a cherry board. Each groove was approximately 1" wide and 3/16" deep. I poured Envirotex Lite epoxy resin (with a little dye) into the grooves to create an inlay. Then, in a moment of stupidity I turned the heat off in my workshop and left it to cure overnight. Fast forward to this morning where I realized my mistake and brought it into the warm house. It has been roughly 18 hours since I poured the epoxy and it is still tacky and not fully hardened. So my questions for you are:
1) Have I ruined this board?
2) Will it finish curing if given enough time?
3) Is there anything I can do to fix this or help with curing?

Thanks for any info you can give!

[Mike Ontko]

Hi Mike. I don't have any answers for you, unfortunately, but I'm planning a project that will have an epoxy resin inlay and am interested in following this post.

I only know that epoxy requires heat to fully cure and that it generates its own heat to some degree based on the volume of material used. Once your project comes back up to temperature, it seems as though the curing process should be able to continue.

[eugene thomas]

I would leave in house for few days. I have grage heated in mid to hi 50's in winter and takes longer to dry for epoxy even when use fast drying takes day or so

[Wayne Lomman]

You can't do anything else other than keep it warm and see what happens.

Epoxy develops amine bloom when it gets too cold during the curing time. That is not necessarily fatal but the usual procedure is to wash and scrub the amine off the surface with fresh water and re coat when it is dry. That works better on a steel object, it's not so good for your job. The best you can do is keep it warm for a few days and see how it goes. If it sets, it worked. If it doesn't, it's time for rework.

As a guide, epoxy prefers 20C but will work between 10C and 35C. Below 10C the curing doesn't proceed correctly as you have found out. These temperatures need to be achieved in both the substrate and the air but you can get away with it if the substrate temp is higher than the air temperature but don't do it the other way around. An object needs to be in a warm room for a while to come up to temperature before proceeding. Low substrate temperature and high air temperature leads to dew formation and that leads to clouding and adhesion problems.

On one of the bridges I was responsible for painting, a snap cold front crossed over us just as we finished painting for the morning. The next morning we had the same problem as you. We had to pressure wash everything when it finally was dry enough. It cost us a week. Cheers

[Steve Eure]

Here is an epoxy designed for cold weather. I have not used this product, but have used other System 3 products and have had great success with them.

https://www.systemthree.com/collections/laminating-coating/products/cold-cure-cold-weather-epoxy

Check this site out and see what it says, May be of some help to you if the epoxy you used doesn't cure. Their website offers tons of info and if you have a question that is not in their FAQ section, shoot them an email and they will respond.

Good luck!
Steve

[Don Peters]

Leave it at elevated temp - inside the house or up to around 100ºF. It will take awhile... maybe quite awhile but it will most likely cure. Eventually. I once glued the second plywood deck skin onto a big racing sailboat. Six guys working all day to get the pre-fitted panels down and pull vacuum on a huge vacuum bag. At the very end we discovered that the epoxy, while mixed carefully in weighed amounts, was slightly off ratio. So what do we do? Pull it all off, throw away $1000 worth of African mahogany plywood plus labor and start over? I did the calculations three or four more times and it was just on the ragged edge of the manufacturer's spec. So we left it. It was finally cured by the time we delivered the boat two months later. Temperature is your friend, so keep it as hot as you can.

[Jacob Reverb]

If all else fails, try cooking it at 125-150°F or so. Might work.

Also, I've found the Gougeon people (of West System) to be invaluable advisors in all things epoxy. Call em up...

[Tim Janssen]

Contact the manufacturer. They should know!

Tim

[Jim Andrew]

I have used fiberglass resin to repair plastic parts, and it takes longer to dry and get hard during winter.

[Mike Geig]

Thanks for the encouragement everyone. Will keep it warm and see what happens

[Bill Dufour]

You left off off location. How cold is cold? Below 50F or so can be problematic. above 100F can get too hot. I would not even try above 120.
Bil lD