[romihs]

Walter have you tried heating the mix by putting the mix container in a sink of hot water?Your viscosity will half or better and allow higher aggregate ratios.The pot life will also shorten.I still think one should experiment with slow epoxy and add heat during mixing without the pot gelling to fast.Try it you will like it.
Larry

Hi all,

I agree with Larry using slow epoxy for this type of application.
But I do feel that if one uses hot E/G, or it heats up during curing, when the curing process slows and the E/G cools, it will shrink.

Now this is not so bad if all you have is E/Q as the the whole mass will shrink equally, but if you have any other kind of material embedded in the E/Q, the CTE's of the two materials being different, will introduce stresses into the structure as it cools.
Again, this could be neglected if the dimensions of the inserts are small, but if one adds rebar to a 4' beam of E/Q, the differences in CTE could cause the entire E/Q structure to buckle,ever so slightly, under the stress induced by the cooling.

Several posts back, someone noted that no forms of reinforcement was ever seen in any photos of these machines. I remember a photo of a huge mold being filled with E/Q and the only 'additions' to the structure were inserts and no reinforcement. It is entirely possible that we have not seen any reinforcement in these structures because the manufacturers want to keep that secret.... but it is also possible that there is no reinforcement within the E/Q because it could cause deformation of the final product with changes in temperature.

That was my 2 cents worth. I have no mechanical engineering background, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there....

Regards

Sandi

P.S. I used an epoxy that has a pot life of 400 minutes and requires 15h curing at RT + 10h at 70C (which I still have not tried yet)...