Too cold in the garage to dry, will be coating in the garage then moving drying in the house. Trying to make due with what I have. Is there any disadvantage with a 1 rpm motor for drying?
Jim

I built my first rod turner using a bbq routisserie motor that ran at 1rpm. I built a couple of rods using that unit. I recently upgraded to a 6 rpm motor and notice no difference in the wrap finishes. I still use the slower turner occassionally but prefer the faster oner for applying the finish.

Before you moved a rod with fresh curing finish from a cold room to a warm.......

I moved a rod with a first coat of finish from a cold unheated room to one that was at room temp. It was the first coat, a thin one, that had been applied about 60 min prior. Everything looked good, no bubbles, no lint, no drips. Moved the rod to the warm space and placed in the rod lathe for this first coat to cure overnight.

The next day I found the rod with HUNDREDS of bubbles throughout the thread work. Bubbles that had formed but not popped. These were not bubbles embedded in the finish, they were well formed little spheres of air that had expanded in a thin film of finish. Most were easily removed with a fingernail, some were a little more difficult and I had to shave off. Some under the frame legs I had to leave. When I was done removing bubbles I was left with hundreds of small finish craters. Fortunately a subsequent coat of finish covered everything up.

A fluke? I was able to repeat this phenomenon on a piece of junk blank that I wrapped thread on and finished in the usual way, so I don't think so. Motto: If I had to I would moved finish work from a warm to a cold room, but not the other way around. If you move work from a cold room to a warm I'd keep an eye on the work to ensure that when air within the thread expands as it warms to form bubbles that you're there to pop these bubbles, and don't do as I did and walk away.....

Lou

Lou good observation - evidently the gas laws are correct! - P1V1 / T1 = P2V2 / T2

If you move a rod and increase temperatures say 30 degrees the entrained air in and under thread could double in volume. The complicating factor in your case is that the pressure can also increase due to the viscosity of the finish. If the finish viscosity has increased to the point that air will be trapped in the finish you will need to find a good name for your new MultiVoid Crater System.

Well, let's start with the first question:

1) We've got drying motors at 6rpm, 11rpm, and something really zippy that we haven't counted yet but looks like 20rpm+. They all work just fine but the 6 is easier to use when applying finish, as was said above. A one or two would be even easier, but the 11 makes coating grips (for example, with spar varnish on cork). It just depends on what you're comfortable with.

2) We found that moving from one temperature extreme to another (like, from cold shed to warm house) produced the same kind of problems you had. We fixed it two ways -
- we heated the shed with an electric space heater. We leave our lathe lights one (really, spotlights) to add heat - these are incandescent style (the flouro overheads don't add much heat). We get the shed as close to the house temp as we can, by heating the shed for a while before we start finish work and by leaving the heater on after a coat is applied as well as the lights. The rods that we start there stay there, until they get to the "tacky/dry" stage and then we take them inside to cure.
- we grabbed a little space in an unused bedroom with a 4' worktable that we converted into a finishing/drying table. It'll hold two drying motors, and the only time we finish rods in the shed is when the table spinners are full. It's not so much that it's temperature-controlled, because it generally is the same temp as the rest of the house (except as I'll describe below) but it's that the humidity is also balanced to the rest of the house and is low, although not dead dry - we don't need the sinus problems). In addition we have a worklight/drying light for the table and some other offset inacendescents as well, that can heat the room if left on to a nice and cozy level. With a combination of warmth ahd low humidity you get nice finishes with a minimum of bubbles.

We pretty much figured all this out because we READ THE INSTRUCTIONS for Flex Coat, Thread Master, and a bunch of other finishing products. They all recommend a certain temperature range for application, drying and curing. We found an ambient temp of 70deg seemed like a good starting point. It worked. More than 74deg had no better effect. That worked too.

Note that our shed working area and finishing table in the house are low-tech and low-cost. We don't have special heaters or air circulators or even humifiers or dehumidifers - we just do it the best we can with stuff bought at Lowe's hardware. The finishing table cost under $100 - it's just a generic workbench with an open bottom shelf, an open top shelf, and a tabletop, all made out of fiberboard. It has a couple drawers. The motors are plugged into a breakered power strip that plugs into the wall. So do the lights. The shed working area is the back bench of the shed where our wrapper/finisher is, with the full set of extensions (7' ) set up. We also have a 6' long card-table that was bought at @#$%& for $20, one of those with the fold-up metal legs, that we can use for anything. The biggest problem we have is making sure that when we close the door to the drying room, none of the kitties are in there sleeping ('cause it's warm).

These are just some ideas we came up with to solve the whole finishing/drying/curing thing. Hope they help.

Uncle Russ
Calico Creek Rods



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/09/2007 01:07AM by Russ Pollack.