How To: TRADE SECRET How pre-mixed epoxy can help you work fast without compromising quality
If you need strength and adhesion in a hurry, or if you’re worried about mixing epoxy accurately or don’t have the right tools to hand, WEST SYSTEM® Six10® pre-mixed adhesive could be the trade secret you’re looking for.
Six10 is designed to help you work easily and with accuracy.
Six10 is a two-part, pre-thickened epoxy adhesive, perfect for stitch-and-glue boat construction, fibreglass laminate repair and general bonding. It balances the toughness of G/flex® with the strength and stiffness of our WEST SYSTEM epoxy, and can be used on wood, metals and composites.
And while we know some people are apprehensive about using pre-mixed, we also know the WEST SYSTEM name on any product guarantees quality you can rely on. Here’s why Six10 is well worth a place in your workshop:
It saves you time
Six10 is provided with a specially designed cartridge that separates the resin and hardener for long-term storage. It also comes with a static mixer that accurately distributes a resin-hardener mix at a ratio of 2:1, and ensures that the resin and hardener stay separate until they are outside the cartridge. So you can spend less time preparing and more time working.
It’s powerful and easy to use.
Six10 is shear thinning. That means it gets thinner when a shear force – such as a roller or the pressure from a caulker gun – is applied to it, and then thickens again once it’s cured. And the advantages of that for you? It means it’s easy to dispense a bead of epoxy exactly where you want it using the static mixer provided. And it means you can easily work Six10 into a strong fillet that won’t sag once it’s cured.
It gives you time to work but cures fast
Six10 is ideal for long or complicated assemblies, because it stays workable in the static mixer for 42 minutes and will give you more than an hour of working time when it’s used in a thin film. Then once you’re happy and it’s in place, it acts fast – with an initial cure that takes between five and six hours.
It’s ideal to wet out substrates
The filler used in both the resin and hardener components of Six10 makes the product ideal to saturate and wet-out light/moderate-weight surfaces like fibreglass and carbon fibre without pre-coating. In fact, using a stiff plastic spreader, you can wet out any fibreglass fabric lighter than 12oz per square yard.
It’s compatible with WEST SYSTEM products
Six10 is designed to work perfectly with all other WEST SYSTEM products, so you can use it on top of or underneath our 105 Epoxy Resin, cured or uncured.
It combines the strengths of 105 and G/flex
Our chemists developed WEST SYSTEM Six10 to bring together the strength of our 105 resin based epoxy and the toughness of G/flex. It has a modulus slightly lower than 105 resin based epoxy, making it suitable for adhesive applications where you might use a filled WESTS SYSTEM epoxy mix. And it can also be used to create laminates closer to a 105 resin based epoxy laminate than the more malleable G/flex laminate.
Sound like a product you need on your shelf? Visit our stockist finder to find out where to buy WEST SYSTEM Six10 Thickened Epoxy Adhesive.