Strip Planking and Safety When Working with Epoxy
We make a habit of immediately using a dry cloth to remove any stray glue that gets on the gloves. This interruption controls the contamination at the source so it doesn’t spread and is a constant reminder to find ways of keeping your hands clean in the first place.
On softwood and end grain, it is wise to do a pre-coat with un-thickened epoxy to reduce the danger of the thirsty wood drawing all the epoxy out of the thickened mixture.
To do this in one step, we anticipated how much epoxy would be absorbed by the wood and mixed the glue to a consistency that would allow for this to happen and leave the right amount of epoxy in the joint. By anticipating the amount of glue that will be absorbed by the wood plus enough to occupy to the space in the joint, there is very little cleanup time, no glue to sand off later and you won’t inadvertently sit on your bench and find yourself stuck in stray glue. Most importantly, the time you are in potential contact with uncured epoxy is kept to a functional minimum.
The bonus for me is that my helpers don’t get epoxy on their gloves so my clamps stay clean.
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