Reinforcing Styrene With Epoxy & Glass Cloth

To reinforce some of my styrene pieces, I used a two-part cold cure epoxy & fiberglass cloth. There is no heat generated to warp the piece & the epoxy will not react with the styrene to melt it. The cold cure takes about 24 hours to fully set up & cure so it can be tricky to work with on vertical surfaces. For smaller items like knees, regular epoxy will set up much quicker & can be used in the same way. Just be sure you have enough open time to saturate the cloth piece before the epoxy kicks off. Also remember to sand the styrene pieces well with 80 grit & clean them with some denatured alcohol.

Nice tip, but I'll bet that chop-strand matt will be easier to work with opposed to the cloth.

Also, "roughing up" the surface with some coarse sandpaper doesn't hurt.

Oh, I almost forgot. You can thicken your epoxy with cabosil.

bigkidbiggertoys wrote:
To reinforce some of my styrene pieces, I used a two-part cold cure epoxy & fiberglass cloth. There is no heat generated to warp the piece & the epoxy will not react with the styrene to melt it.

This sounds just what I need - I've used some ordinary fibreglass resin and it warped the styrene. Took several weeks, but it pulled it all out of shape. Can you post the specs of the epoxy you used? Reason is that I'm in New Zealand and probably won't be able to get the exact same brand out here. Thanks.

I just checked the bottles & the company name is Industrial Formulators. Here is a link to there website http://www.indform.com/

This stuff is a slow curing epoxy resin. You could get the same result if you used a 20 minute epoxy & soaked some glass cloth in it. Just put it in a cool place to kick off & there should be no heat to warp the styrene pieces.