WEST SYSTEM: Better DIY with WEST SYSTEM® epoxy
If you’re going to spend your time off doing jobs around the house instead of reading the paper or going to the pub, you at least want repairs that look great. Get the results you need with WEST SYSTEM® epoxy, says our DIY master David Johnson.
Our epoxy guru David has jobs to do around the house like the rest of us. For years, he’s had an old piece of wood covering a downpipe but it kept getting blocked up with leaves. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he turned a collection of old bits of plywood into a premium drain cover with the help of WEST SYSTEM epoxy.
Drain: covered
“I didn’t have a bit of plywood big enough for the drain cover, so I bonded several offcuts together with the WEST SYSTEM epoxy,” says David. “I even glued a couple of wedges underneath so the water would run off.”
To protect the drain cover for years and decades to come and to give it a great-looking finish, David coated it with WEST SYSTEM 105 Epoxy Resin® / WEST SYSTEM 207 Special Coating Hardener™, adding black pigment to the third, fourth and fifth coats.
“Prepping the surface is always so important with epoxy, so I made sure the whole drain cover was clean and abraded with 40-grit paper, which lifts up some of the wood fibres. I did the first two ‘primer’ coats with resin/hardener mix, waiting just long enough for the epoxy to go tacky, just like an osmosis treatment on a boat. Then I added the coats with the black pigment in the same way and the final result was stunning.”
WEST SYSTEM 105/207 epoxy offers some UV protection, making it more than durable enough for garden and outdoor applications. “Of course, you’d need UV-protecting paint on top of the epoxy for a boat but the UV protection offered by WEST SYSTEM 105/207 epoxy was more than good enough for my drain cover in the garden.”
David has completed countless other DIY jobs in the past with WEST SYSTEM 105/207 epoxy, all with great results. “I’ve restored the gable ends on a garden shed, coated the roof of a bee hive and also coated garden furniture I made using this method. All the work looks great and has stood the test of time.”
Fence post: fixed
One item checked off the “to do” list, then, but David still wasn’t satisfied. “I like to save up all my jobs so I don’t waste any epoxy. You might think I can get all the epoxy I want as I work at West System International but it’s never good to waste something you know will go to landfill – so I don’t”, says David. “Project planning is key to make the best possible use of your epoxy and your time,” he adds.
So David used some of his left over WEST SYSTEM products to fix a rotting fence post. “You can have a perfectly good fence post that’s rotten right at the end where it’s been wicking up water from the wet ground,” says David. “Instead of installing a new fence post that would be expensive and look out of place with the others, I decided to cut off the last 30cm of the rotting one and use the “hardware bonding ” technique to fix it.”
I cut a new section of fencepost to glue onto the bottom of the old post and drilled over-sized holes in both pieces,” says David. “I then cut off the head of a big bolt and set it in the two holes in WEST SYSTEM epoxy, joining the two pieces of wood together. The join will never, never come apart and the fence post is as good as new.”
Toilet seat: re-hinged
With a coating job and a hardware bonding job already under his belt, David finally got round to an unhinged toilet seat. “The welding had broken on the hinges and re-welding them wasn’t an option, which meant I needed a different kind of solution altogether,” he says.
In the end, David opted to do the repair with a small piece of carbon cloth, bonded to the hinge with WEST SYSTEM G/flex® epoxy. “Basically, I just wrapped the unidirectional carbon around the hinge bush holder and glued it with G/flex epoxy to hold the stainless steel captive on the hinge,” says David. “Because G/flex epoxy offers the strongest adhesion to steel from our entire range of adhesives, I know it will be an extremely effective, long-lasting repair.”
For more information about David’s DIY adventures, or how you can complete your own home improvement and repair projects with WEST SYSTEM epoxy, see our user guides or contact us.