Epoxy Variations: II (Presto)

While I was waiting for the window casing boards to fumigate themselves, I turned my attention at last back to the dormer itself. Obviously the whole thing needs sanding, but there are a few things I wanted to do beforehand. One of these was to glue up the several cracks in the siding on the right side.

Before he abandoned work on this dormer entirely, the contractor did replace all of the siding on the right side save the top piece. You can see here where he shimmed it out to match the old siding:

As you can see, he simply placed the 3/16" shimming piece behind the shiplap, without laminating the two together as I did. You can also see how the new, thinner stock has already started to warp and crack.

Here, you can see that he was not sufficiently careful, when placing the new boards, not to crack the old one:

You see here what I was telling you about the new, thinner shiplap:

When cut in short pieces, it has a tendency to crack. Now it should be quite evident why I took the trouble to laminate the plywood shims to the new pieces of siding to go on the left side.

All told, there were about a half-dozen cracks on this side of the dormer, and I didn't want to take a great deal of time to repair them. So, I used my secret weapon in such cases: one-minute epoxy, packed in a dual-plunger setup with a mixing tip. All you have to do is put the tip on, press the plunger, and out comes perfectly-mixed epoxy that sets in 60 seconds. It's thick enough to fill gaps and thin enough to get into tight cracks. It's great stuff when you're in a hurry.

So I put on some nitrile gloves, started gluing, and in a scant three minutes I was all done, after pushing the two widest cracks shut while the epoxy cured.

Sure, it's a mess, but I'll just sand off the drips as I do the normal sanding of the surface. Problem solved!

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"Mmmmm. . . beefy fresh!"