| I am sure that a lot of modellers when visiting the shows have seen the short length of wing showing the four stages in glass covering a wing with epoxy resin. The results are very impressive to say the least and you go off with the glass cloth and resin thinking you are going to get a wing with a similar finish.
In my past days of competition glider guiding I did a lot of glassing, however using epoxy it is a thoroughly sticky messy process and the results are often disappointing with ‘fish eye’ (it looks like a fish’s eye – one on the fishmonger slab that is) and mysterious ‘air’ bubbles that appear over night, and only infrequently were all the elements in my favour and I achieved results like the show test piece.
I recently wanted to glass a model wing and decided to give Poly C a try as I had seen a model covered using Poly C and the results were impressive, but I was a little concerned about using a water based adhesive on balsa. As Grahame says it is far nicer to use than epoxy but I had a problem with some areas of the wing, where the veneer wasn’t properly bonded to the foam the veneer warped alarmingly but this disappeared over a few days as it dried out thoroughly. Giving the wing a few coats of sanding sealer as some pundit recommend made no difference.
In my case the model had three coats of Poly C which was sufficient as I was covering it with Solarspan so I can’t say how many coats are required to fully fill the weave and give a surface ready for painting. |