Adhesive with a long open time

[Tom M King]

Restaurant suppliers and fiberglass supply stores sell sleeves of wax free paper cups. Probably on eBay too.

[Michael Burnside]

Restaurant suppliers and fiberglass supply stores sell sleeves of wax free paper cups. Probably on eBay too.

Yep I got mine from a restaurant supplier on Amazon I think. I have 500 little wax-free paper cups which are awesome for most projects.

[Don Peters]

Cat food cans; you've already paid for them. And you can often pop any hardened residue out and recycle them.

[Wes Grass]

I glued something up with UF. Waited until a warm part of the year. Santa Cruz mountains... 'don't like the weather ... give it a minute, it'll change' ... McMaster ... next day a small space heater and a couple heavy moving blankets I already had ...

House didn't burn down while I was at work...

[Wes Grass]

Cat food cans; you've already paid for them. And you can often pop any hardened residue out and recycle them.

The only 'hardened residue' I find is cat food ... our 2 'boo's' leave behind. One is a picky little be-atch, showed up at the door one night ...the other a psycho polydactyl 'Highland Curl' ... bred in Texas.

[Randy Heinemann]

I’ve never had a problem with Titebond II Extend. However I doubt it would give you. 30-minute open time. I’d say no longer than 20 minutes and that might be pushing it. Epoxy is most likely the adhesive to use for 30 minutes open time.

[Michael Burnside]

TB II extend is my go to as well Randy. But yea, doesn’t even compare to open time of epoxy with a slow hardener.

[Mike Henderson]

One thing to watch for when using epoxy with a slow hardener. The chemical reaction generates heat and heat speeds up the reaction. If I mix up a fair amount of epoxy for a large glue-up, I get some ice and put my container of epoxy in the ice to keep it cool.

The first time I used a significant amount of epoxy - without ice - it hardened up on me in the container before I was finished with the glue-up.

This was West Systems with the slow hardener and maybe two squirts of resin and hardener.

Mike

[Kevin Jenness]

There's always a risk of premature curing. Ice and/or a fan can help dissipate heat from the mix but the first lines of defense are to mix in small batches and get the mix spread out quickly in a flat pan or on the work to increase the surface area. I had a batch kick off in a roller pan once to the point that it started smoking and I had to toss it out a second story window for fear of ignition. Once you get a whiff of the devil's throne room coming off a hot batch of epoxy you won't want to repeat the experience.

From an Epoxyworks (West System) post: Epoxy heating out of control can foam, smoke, give off dangerous vapors and generate enough heat to melt its container or cause nearby items to catch fire. https://www.epoxyworks.com/index.php...ling-exotherm/

[Tom M King]

I had a boat business back in the 1980's that included repairing fiberglass and bulding sailboards using both epoxy and polyester resins. I had an oversized air conditioner that could cool the shop down to low 60's fairly quickly for layup, then we'd turn it up to normal to let it cure. It didn't matter how hot it was outside and worked fantastically.

I expect most of us have done what Kevin was describing of making epoxy foam. A local guy told me he was doing some auto body work in his yard. He mixed up a gallon of Bondo, and went in the house to eat lunch before going to work with it.............

[Maurice Mcmurry]

Allegedly Robert Manry was one of the first boating enthusiasts to prove the usefulness of epoxy for wooden boat building and repair. I have posted about Tinkerbelle several times. It is an interesting story.

https://www.robertmanryproject.com/tinkerbelle/

My first experience with epoxy was helping my brother create air tight waterproof foot lockers for storing and transporting 54 inch commercial wall covering. His pasting machine was permanently set up in his shop and he would show up at a paperhanging job with the wallpaper all pasted and ready to go, stored in his custom airtight foot lockers. His main interest was cars and his first attempts to waterproof his wallpaper boxes were with polyester resin and fiberglass. Polyester did not work. West System solved the problem. Back then you had to call the Gougeon Brothers on the land line to get advice and order resins. With the leftover epoxy from the waterproof footlocker project I built a boat.

IMG_1989.jpg

[Prashun Patel]

I've used System 3 T-88. It has about 45 minutes open time. I recommend it.

However, you mentioned "complicated" glue up. Beware that 2 part epoxies require mixing, and are high viscosity, so they are slow and messy to apply (you can't really brush it on that easily as you can Titebond).

So for complicated glue ups, you should consider using a combination of TB for some of the joints and epoxy for only the ones that can't be quickly clamped.

[Jimmy Harris]

You can push the open time of PVA glues a bit by adding a little bit of water and using them in colder temperatures. It also helps if you can raise the humidity or refrigerate the glue (don't freeze it). I've pushed TB3 to about 30 minutes and had no issues doing that. PVA hardens by evaporation, so if you slow the evaporation, you slow the drying speed. Just don't dilute the glue too much, where it gets all runny and thins out on your joints. The idea is to add the same amount of water to the glue that will evaporate while it's open, so it'll have the same water percentage in the glue when you go to clamp up your work as fresh glue out of the bottle would have.

A long set epoxy would be the better option, but those are some tricks to try to get a little more open time out of PVA glues, should you ever need them.