Bad Shop Day

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J

jocat54

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Dec 4, 2009
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Lindale, Texas
Well I spent the better part of the morning cutting and gluing up a four color segment pen, kind of a checker board design. Turned it to round and put it in my collet chuck and drilled it for a sierra tube--all goes good. Glue tube in and turned it to size and sanded all nicely. Got four coats of BLO/CA finish on it--still looking good--next coat of ca and it starts coming apart:mad::mad::mad:. Guessing I got the blank to hot putting on the ca and the heat made the ca on the tube give up!!

Oh well sometimes you just don't win. I will try it again later. The really bad thing about it is this is the first shop time I've had it a few weeks.

Rant over!!
 
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Sorry to hear this! Just for my own idle curosity, did you glue up the segments with CA or Epoxy? I have done EXACTLY the same thing when I glued up with CA. Unwillingly, I started using epoxy for my segments. The CA is MUCH easier for me to work with, but the epoxy seems to hold the heat better when finishing.

Anyway, I've been there and feel your pain! The next one will be even better!
 
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John, I've never gotten a tube hot enough to cause the CA inside to "let go" at anytime. I've had them come out because of bad bond or poor coverage, or impatience on my part to start turning, but Heat? How hot was it getting? Was it just from the ca you were putting on the outside curing? Or was something else injecting heat into the blank? I had a live center once that the bearings started getting rough, and it would heat a blank up. Might check that. But, I would be more likely to suspect that the blo or ca you were applying got into the set CA between the tube and blank and un-set it. I'm not positive though. If it's something like that, you might consider putting on the first coat, and giving it time to really cure all the way through, then going on with the rest of the coats?

Odd problem, I'm curious to see what everybody else has to say.
 
I was using BLO/thin CA and I turn between centers. I do get the blanks pretty hot when I do the finish(My fingers get so hot thru severval layers of a blue shop towel that I have to let go) but I have been doing all my finishes this way. Maybe just got a bad bond on the tube to start.

The live center seems good.
 
When this happened to me (almost exactly the same situation), I started gluing my segments with epoxy and switched to medium CA/BLO for the finish.

It hasn't happened since, but that one failure could have been bad bond or I could have just been lucky since? I would like to use CA for the segements because it is far less messy! But, it is heart-breaking to spend all that time cutting and glueing something like a herringbone only to have it fail during finishing.

My theroy was that the thin CA cured SO quickly that it produces big, big heat....softening the glue holding the segments and tube. The more layers of finish, the hotter the blank. That could explain why it failed on thin CA coat five?

Just a theory?
 
PenMan1 said:
When this happened to me (almost exactly the same situation), I started gluing my segments with epoxy and switched to medium CA/BLO for the finish.

It hasn't happened since, but that one failure could have been bad bond or I could have just been lucky since? I would like to use CA for the segements because it is far less messy! But, it is heart-breaking to spend all that time cutting and glueing something like a herringbone only to have it fail during finishing.

My theroy was that the thin CA cured SO quickly that it produces big, big heat....softening the glue holding the segments and tube. The more layers of finish, the hotter the blank. That could explain why it failed on thin CA coat five?

Just a theory?
Click to expand...


I think you are right.
 
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