Monday, June 8, 2015

Cracked stab #2

Cracked one of my long rods for the second time the other weekend - carbon tube came loose from the base stud.  No catastrophic failure or anything, I only noticed it when I went to do it up and it obviously spun the tube on the stud slightly.

I've already glued this stab up once before with 24 hour epoxy and clamping, but apparently my glue-jitsu was insufficient to the task.  I'm suspecting the gelcoat surface of the inside of the rod is just too slick to stick to.

I finally wrestled the stud out and the last batch of epoxy was still bonded to the alloy stud OK, so I cleaned it all off and scrubbed the inside of the tube out with a wire wheel on a Dremel, then cleaned everything with acetone.

This time I have busted out the 72-hour cure epoxy and I'll see how it goes.  I made up a clamp to hold everything from moving for the full cure time, although to be honest I think it was more just preventing any form of movement, because the mating surfaces are a concentric circle thing.



The excess I left to cure up seemed to cure pretty well so I'll see how it goes.

If this doesn't work then I've got NFI what I'm going to do with it.  I could try to scrounge up some industrial grade adhesive, but even the smallest container of of it costs about as much as it would to just replace the rod.

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