CA finish gone wrong.. How did you recover?

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sschering

sschering

Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2009
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Location
Eugene, OR
I nearly had a very bad day yesterday..

I was finishing the cap on a set of Toni's PC tubes for my wife's pen with my usual method of thin CA applied with a paper towel. No accelerator used.

On coat 3 or 4 I must have put it on too thick.. As I'm doing the quick back on forth the CA got tacky faster than expected and suddenly the towel is grabbing & shredding. The moment of horror, bits of CA embedded towel stuck all over the tube..

This is the "oh no what have I done!" moment..

I can't scrap it off and aggressive sanding will ruin the tube..

I ended up very carefully wet sanding by hand it lathe off bit by bit with 800 grit until I got all the bits of towel off.. I think it was about half an hour of muttering obscenities at myself..

So no more towels for me.. I finished the job with a Nytrile glove and overall I think I got better results that way. As a bonus I'm not picking CA off my fingers today.
 
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Try Craft foam. Every once in a while it will stick but not very often and I don't have that tough of a time sanding it back off when it does.
 
Hi, Wow a friend from Alabama just moved to Kennewick, she works at the Dam...anyway, this has happen several time since I put one or two light coats of CA on all my pens. I bought a sponge like paper at Walmart crafts, big sheets of 12X14 or so cut much smaller..but works fabulous for CA..CA doesn't go thru. One drop at the time and back and forth quickly usually does the trick..I never thought about the glove..
 
May I ask what kind of paper towels you were using? I have had mixed results with different brands. The Scotts brand shop towels that are blue have worked well for me. I did get a roll of NOT Scotts brand blue paper towels that started smoking when I applied CA to them.
 
I actually just switched to using the blue nitrite gloves from the pharmacy section for applying my CA, has worked like a charm ever since. I've had good luck with craft foam and papertowels as long as it's a thick spongy paper towel. The cheap stuff won't work well :/
 
I have been using the costo Kirkland brand towels. I have a 95% success rate with them.. Naturally when the most expensive blank in the shop hits the lathe I get the odd fail.
 
Yes, I would suggest you to start applying the CA with the craft foam strips (about 3/4" wide and at least 5" long for some better hand grip).

The worse time to have anything to get stuck on the CA with those type blanks is when, it happens on the very first layer, the risk of sanding through the blank material itself is always greater than after a few layers however, I wouldn't panic too much, sure you don't want that to happen and certainly not often but, you have to remember that, the applicator material is stuck to the CA and not to the blank material so, using either wet and dry 400 or dry 240 grit sand paper, you can easily remove the "stuff" out.

Here is where, you either make it or you buggered it up as, is the way you are going to use the sand paper that will determine the final result.

Sure, if you are proficient with the skew, you can remove that layer of CA and anything that is stuck to it, that way and continue on however, if you feel that using a cutting tools is too much of a risk to you, grab a straight wood pen blank, wrap the sandpaper to it and, WITH THE LATHE OFF use the flat surface of the sandpaper wrapped pen blank to "rub" the foreign material that is stuck to the CA FIRST, reducing the amount of friction pressure as the material gets removed, finish with a gentle uniform rub to the whole barrel with a fine grit and continue on...!

Time consuming...??? yes, it is but, not the end of the world, particularly if you can use a skew to solve these issues...!

Cheers
George
 
robutacion said:
Time consuming...??? yes, it is but, not the end of the world, particularly if you can use a skew to solve these issues...!

Cheers
George
Click to expand...

My skew hates me. It behaves beautifully, lulling me into a false sense of security, then, when I have an expensive blank mounted, it attacks! The dread spiral catch. I'm plotting my revenge. I think I'm going to regrind it into a scraper.
 
Fortunately for me I have deliberately done this very same thing just to see what would happen. I ended up sanding the chunks off with 400 grit and some times spot sanding with the lathe off is needed.

Also what kills me about this thread is the shear volume of posts telling you to throw new tools/materials at a problem with the method. Also worth note is not one of these post ask if you were using odorless CA. FYI odorless CA is listed as 'foam safe' meaning it *WILL* bond to foam.

On coat 3 or 4 I must have put it on too thick.. As I'm doing the quick back on forth the CA got tacky faster than expected and suddenly the towel is grabbing & shredding. The moment of horror, bits of CA embedded towel stuck all over the tube..
Click to expand...

I bet if you looked you would find that your surface area that was in direct contact with the tube was quite large when this happened. In fact it was probably wider than it should have been. When that happens it is way easier to do an ever so slight rotation and cause the edges to catch onto something. Also if you looked you will find the gap between the towel and the blank was to small. The purpose of the towel is to catch the excess glue. One of the things I have been working with is applying CA finishes with nothing other than the bottle.

Another factor that really stuck out at me is the 'quick back and forth' so likely there was some non-linear presses into the blank which caused it to grab. Try slowing that way down and make more deliberate thoughtful passes.
 
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