Resin turned green...

pklonowski

pklonowski

Unrepentant Canoeist
I was at the Quiet Adventures Symposium this weekend, helping the Michigan Chapter run the WCHA booth. Late in the afternoon, a woman asked about a lapstrake boat her father had built about 40 yrs ago (ca. 1980s), which had the fiberglassing resin turn green as it cured. Does anybody have any idea how this happened?

Apparently when her father saw the green hue, he felt defeated, and stopped work on it. His daughter is interested in repairing it, and understands the need for stripping the existing glass before trying again, painstaking as it would be. And her father is not able to help with any details of what materials were used, or anything else.

Thanks in advance...
 
Yup. I've had that happen, many (like 50) years ago. I can't remember what brand it was. Back then I used to buy whatever the local hardware store had on the shelves. The hardeners came in small plastic tubes and often were from totally different manufacturers. I did not give it a second thought. There were lots of interesting variations of the resin color and green was one of the most common ones.
When I was making kayaks, my resin source was from a 55 gallon drum. That never turned green, or bluish. It was very tan/brownish. I blended pigment in to colorize it.
 
All good to know. Now I have to find the piece of paper with her contact info... uh oh...

Thank you!
 
Paul, it was probably polyester resin. As MCG says, it came with a small tube of hardener. In contrast, epoxy might be a 1:1 mix, or 2:1, or even 5:1 resin to hardener, but not just a small tube. On the plus side, some people have said that polyester is easier to remove than epoxy.
 
That would be polyester resin. It will generally contain a promoter, which reacts with the liquid MEKP (methyl ethyl ketone peroxide) hardener to generate the heat needed for the resin to harden. There are several different promoters that are used, most of which will tint the resin a bit - either blue, green, brown or redish.
 
What she wants and what she practically can have may not be one and the same. Apparently, her father figured that out and folded up his tent. Anyone who has ever removed glass from a hull should have firsthand knowledge of how difficult it is to remove every bit of it. Unless you commit to weeks of time picking away at each little spot, you will almost certainly never remove it all. Glass cloth may come off easily, but the resin the puddled over the tops of the tacks, that filled each dimple, that snuck in between the planking, it's there to make you crazy. Been there and done that, several times. What is not clear is if there is even cloth on it? As a lapstrake, there shouldn't be so this exercise could be one of removing bonded resin. Paint might not be such a bad idea. At least the boat will be useable. If a proper lapstrake is the goal (ignoring the resin choice) then maybe a phone call to Kevin Martin or someone else building these hulls would be a logical next step.
 
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Agreed on wants vs can have. I pulled glass off both the inside and outside of the stripper I built many years ago... and then decided if anyone ever came into my shop with a job like that, I'd tell them it would be cheaper to buy two new boats than to fix this one. Sentiment can drive people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, that's for sure. But this is out of my hands at this time... lol
 
Just about 48 years ago when Jerry and I were building together in Lubec, Maine we had an order that called for a clear fiberglass hull. Since we were desperate for any canoe order at all, we abandoned our "We'll never work with fiberglass" principles and said "You betcha". After all we had some glassing experience from our years at the boat school and it seemed straight forward. Its not so good for the canoe hull but money talks.
At that time the Lubec area was a very economic depressed part of the state. We found some inexpensive polyester resin and fiberglass cloth at a lobster boat yard in Eastport which was 10 miles away by water and 60 miles by road. Who needs that more expensive stuff they sold at the marine hardware stores. Resin is resin, Right?
Anyway, we did a beautiful job on the hull and had that fiberglass and resin on there wicked smooth. It was shiny and clear as glass to show off the wood hull. But over the week, in certain light, we could detect a slight green hue. With a little bit more time the only way not to see the green hue was to turn off the lights. We buffed, polished, varnished and it was still there. We hoped, maybe the customer would be picking the boat up at night.
Long story short, the customer accepted a painted green hull; we took a monetary loss on the boat that we could ill afford on our $40 week salary; we learned that not all resins are the same; and we swore off fiberglass forever.
 
Rollin Thurlow said:
Just about 48 years ago when Jerry and I were building together in Lubec, Maine we had an order that called for a clear fiberglass hull. Since we were desperate for any canoe order at all, we abandoned our "We'll never work with fiberglass" principles and said "You betcha". After all we had some glassing experience from our years at the boat school and it seemed straight forward. Its not so good for the canoe hull but money talks.
At that time the Lubec area was a very economic depressed part of the state. We found some inexpensive polyester resin and fiberglass cloth at a lobster boat yard in Eastport which was 10 miles away by water and 60 miles by road. Who needs that more expensive stuff they sold at the marine hardware stores. Resin is resin, Right?
Anyway, we did a beautiful job on the hull and had that fiberglass and resin on there wicked smooth. It was shiny and clear as glass to show off the wood hull. But over the week, in certain light, we could detect a slight green hue. With a little bit more time the only way not to see the green hue was to turn off the lights. We buffed, polished, varnished and it was still there. We hoped, maybe the customer would be picking the boat up at night.
Long story short, the customer accepted a painted green hull; we took a monetary loss on the boat that we could ill afford on our $40 week salary; we learned that not all resins are the same; and we swore off fiberglass forever.
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Wicked smooth. Ayup.
 
There isn't a brand or type of polyester resin which is really made with the intention of sticking well to wood. Fifty years ago, when Norm Sims and I were building strippers, we became very picky about polyester. I was a dealer for Wilderness Boats out of Oregon, builders of David Hazen's stripper designs and we used their same resin on the boats we built. By first priming the bare wood with a couple rolled-on coats of a Pratt and Lambert lacquer sanding sealer, which smelled like a 5,000 lb. banana, the sealer soaked in and stuck to the wood and the polyester resin (US Polyesters 329-2 unwaxed laminating resin) stuck very well to the sealer. We never had to worry about delamination, which is the death of most old polyester strippers, and the biggest reason that most of them are not worth trying to repair. We see some fantastic restorations of wood/canvas boats here, but strippers, not so much. Most old strippers can be patched up enough to float, but they are never going to be pretty and the project is likely to take more time and work than starting from scratch with a new build.

This canoe is a polyester resin stripper, 51 years old and still going strong. The right resin and the right technique and primer made all the difference. The drift boat was built a couple years later, but I don't know where it ended up after I sold it.
 

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Resin and re-inventing the wheel.

Back when resin 1st came out, Joe used it for about 10 years, early 50's to early 60's, mainly in an effort to shorten the build time.
He made about 120 canoes with resin, and he even made 9 all glass canoes (customer request).

He stopped using resin in the mid 1960's and never used it again.

Dan
 
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