Not resinating

One thing I learned on the Albemarle project was the importance of securely attaching components before their entombment inside of larger elements. If said component detached, they would rattle around inside and be impossible to re-attach. The project would be ‘ruined’.

For the Illustrious, this would mean that anything inside the hull+flight deck could not ever detach, no matter how vigorous the model was handled (like aggressive sanding or even ‘drops’).  As the compartments along both inner starboard and port sides would, per instructions, be glued to the hull walls, there was always the possibility that the glue butt joints would fail.

So, I decided that the solution would be to fill the hull with resin up to the bottom of the compartments so their would be not only butt-jointed attachment points to the hull sides but there would be a glue-supported gravity joint between the bottom of the compartment and the top of the resin pour.

Before the resin could be poured, I would need to install conduit for the wiring to light up the cable and quarter decks.

The wiring then fed out the bottom of the hull as shown here (there will be a full post on the wiring later)

You can see in the first photo that I built some bulkheads for the resin pours as each compartment was at a different height. These bulkheads would need to be liquid resin-tight as otherwise the pour would get all over the place.

I used Micro Scale LiquiTape to temporarily mount the compartments (except for one compartment where I idiotically used liquid cement).

Here you can see everything temporarily mounted so I’d have a good idea as to how high to pour the resin within each inner cell.

Using resin from MicroMark, I followed the instructions and mixed up 1:1 portions.

And let the pouring begin!  You have to work quickly as the resin will quickly harden.

or not ?  Note the cloudiness after a few minutes.

Up by the cable deck, it was even worse – the resin never hardened.

I waited a week – the resin simply never cured. It was viscous, very sticky to the touch, and if you tipped the model slightly, the resin would start flowing.  Even worse, it had leaked out of the bottom, not so resin-tight gaps

So, what was the problem?

Obviously, I should have experimented before pouring into the hull. I decided the causes were either:

• The Micro Mark resin (although never opened) was too old – I had bought it more than 4 years ago
• I didn’t mix it thoroughly enough, perhaps frightened off by the package warnings stating the pour life was extremely short.

Regardless, I had a real mess (and a sticky-tacky mess at that) on my hands.  Even after a month, the resin was gummy and gooey.  I couldn’t dig it out as it was bonded to the hull sides and bottom.

The eventual solution was similar to how we deal with nuclear waste – bury it under an impermeable surface.  After soaking up the liquid elements using lots of  paper towels, I ended up cutting to size various .06″ styrene sheets to sit atop the tacky resin messes in each hull cell.  Thus, any handling of the model during construction would have my fingers touch pure styrene rather than gloppy guck.  This took a while as all the cells are shaped differently.  You can see some of the work here:

All of the gaps where the sheets wouldn’t cover were filled with extra thick CA glue. Paper towel remained stuffed in some places for weeks, wicking out the last of the moisture. When done, the model was now ready to handle, no longer leaked, and as a side effect, quite heavy.

As an aside, I experimented later in one of the hull cells (cable deck) using recently purchased TAP Plastics resin. I really mixed it up well (I think their instructions were better – reminding me to scrape the cup insides as well as stir).  A pour was made and it cured as expected.  Live (hard) and learn (hard).