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1. The manual recommends applying a coat of epoxy (but by now we know that that means two coats) before assembling the pieces. That makes sense. But what bout varnishing? Should I varnish before assembling? If so, will the super glue tack welds adhere to the varnish. Will the fillets?
2. Speaking of fillets, the manual recommends thickening the epoxy with cell-o-fill for the fillets. Up to this point all of the fillets have been made with wood flour. Cell-o-fill “glue” was used between pieces of wood, but not in the angle between them. Is it correct to use cell-o-fill thickened epoxy in this application?
Deepwoods, I’m just a little bit ahead of you on the galley shelf. I wouldn’t varnish for the reasons you mentioned: the fillets may not stick well. Also, unless you are REALLY good at making perfectly clean fillets, you’ll probably end up having to sand the fillets and surrounding area again anyway.
Cell-o-fill is the correct thickener for these fillets. I don’t know why the manual changed from wood flour. For me, the fillets with Cell-o-fill seemed smoother, less chunky than the wood flour. Maybe wood flour is better for larger structural fillets? You will of course need to add a lot more Cell-o-fill for fillets than when you mixed just for sandwiching between pieces of wood.
My two cents: I thickened all of the fillets throughout with both wood flour and cell-o-fill. I don’t see any reason to use cell-o-fill-only fillets for the galley shelf. I can’t remember where, but I read somewhere, and my experience is, that the cell-o-fill helps make the wood fillets more smooth and fluid, so you get less of that chunky application even when the fillet is fairly thick/viscous. But if you use cell-o-fill-only fillets, they end up white, which to my taste doesn’t look as good as a fillet that is closer to the color of the wood. I agree that it would be a mistake to varnish the shelf before installing it.
Good save, GeneEverRead. You’re right about the white color of the cell-o-fill fillets. My wife is a chemist, is trained to test any assumptions, and has been the primary epoxy mixer on this project. So naturally she mixed up a small batch of epoxy with 100% cell-o-fill, another with a ratio of 75% cello-o-fill to 25% wood flour and a 50:50 mixture. She laid out a small bead of each and let them dry. Sure enough, the cell-o-fill-only batch dried white. The 50:50 batch dried close to the wood color, and the 75:25 batch was intermediate. I’m pretty sure I don’t want the galley shelf to look like it was put together with Elmer’s Glue. We’ll go with 50:50. The Manual, way back in the early pages where materials are discussed, recommends mixing in 10% cell-o-fill with the wood flour to make smoother fillets, which we did for the majority of fillets, especially where they show.
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