Disaster...or Victory?

I was going to put a piece of 4.25" x 36" x 0.25" plate glass on the short side of a level and do the layup on that.  It's actually basically what I did.  You can see one of the plastic layers I used to prevent the glass from becoming a permanent part of the guitar; before I started, there were two for complete coverage.

I mixed 8oz of epoxy at a time in one of the 9oz measuring cups, 6 of the main ingredient to 2 of the hardener.  To this I added a couple of drops of the blue dye.  Each 8oz batch of epoxy got me about 4 sheets of wood/cloth.

I put down the epoxy on the bare wood sheet, then put down the fiberglass, then more epoxy. I attempted to press any air gaps out each time I added a sheet of wood, using my hands as a roller.  Keeping the epoxy, hardener and dye containers from being cross-contaminated and permanently wrecked was difficult.  Each piece of cloth soaked up the epoxy well (called "wetting" in the trade, I think), but needed help with little wrinkles.  The glass fiber strands from the edge of the cloth kept getting into my brush, onto my hands, and onto the piece, but it was manageable.

As you can see, by this point I've taken the glass off the edge of the level, because it wouldn't stand up properly.  Each time I ran out of blue glop, I changed gloves and mixed up a new 8oz batch.  By the time I had 13 sheets or so, I'd reached an inch thick and called it quits.
 
I already had the heat box set up in the driveway.  I'd cut some hardboard to spread the load of the small (3 and 5 pound) dumbbell weights I planned to use in lieu of clamps; all of it was outside waiting for me.  The plan:

1. Put the stack, already on the plate glass, onto the edge of the level
2. Run it outside and set one end in the opening of the heat box
3. Slide it into the heatbox, adding one weight at a time, the level on edge keeping the bottom layer perfectly, utterly flat for attaching a fingerboard!

What happened:

1. The sloshy, goopy stack of blue glop, satiny cloth and sheets of wood slid off the level and the glass when I added weight to it
2. My driveway is not very flat, so the bottom of the heat box wasn't flat
3. No matter what I did, the wood/glop/cloth slab would not stay rectilinear under weight

Oh my.  I had to keep the sheets vertical, and I was getting a little stressed out - each time the stack slid wide, I imagined all my epoxy smearing out and air getting in there.  After several attempts, and completely abandoning the narrow edge of the level for the broad side, I decided to use clamps to hold the sheets in line.  I put it in the heat box and the lamp would of course not go on.  Finally, it got that sorted - an outlet that was switched with the basement light!  Of course.

During the long wait, I finished off Possession by A.S. Byatt in ten minute chunks while I bopped the curing temperature between 160 and 180F.  At the end of nearly 3 hours, I'd had enough and called it quits.  I had no idea what to expect when i opened the box; I'd fixed the sheets sideways - but had they all slid off each other lengthwise?


That's my super-excellent emergency clamping job, visible after the mess came out of the oven.  There's the glass on top, and obviously somehow some space developed between the glass and the bottom wood sheet, because the ripples in the plastic sheet between the two are clearly visible.

In another interesting development, the clamps seemed thoroughly epoxied to my guitar neck.  I was concerned with hitting them too hard with a hammer, lest the cast parts smash the glass, but I had no choice.  There was glass fiber frizzing off it, so I took it outside with a framing hammer and bonked the orange parts of the clamp toward the ends of the board and they did come loose, but left their paint in the matrix.

That is one gnarly board.  I don't even feel like measuring it today.  The pretty, wispy fiberglass fibers are still there, lunging straight for my lungs, but they are now accompanied by some brittle, nasty glass fibers that seem to want to embed themselves in my skin and travel through my bloodstream to my brain.  Seriously, I don't like this board at all.  Part of me wishes I had not made it, it's so ornery.

What I learned:

1. Composites are sticky and messy
2. Composites are also hard-edged and brutal
3. I might never know if I put too much weight on the piece and drove out too much of the epoxy from the cloth
4. Build a clamping jig because even very flat, comparatively wide sheets want to slide off each other
5. Consider not paying so much attention to making the piece "perfectly" flat, because at my skill level it's not likely to happen

Next step:  Trimming the board with someone else's table saw.  The air will be filled with sparkling death!