Understandable, so anyone please correct me on this if possible.
So does any woodshop use epoxy other than in China?
I won't quote the entire post, but hopefully this info helps clear up things. There's no "ban" on using resin in the US/Mexico which was stated somewhere in this thread. The reason manufacturers in North America don't use it is because it's hard to work with and labor is expensive.
In China, labor is relatively inexpensive. They also tend to set up manufacturing areas, so the entire workforce of a town or city know how to make a narrow set of things and are trained to do it in a repeatable way. ie: There's a district for woodworking and that's all that can be done there. There's a district for metal work & casting, that's all that can be done there. Another district where they just make industrial machines, and so on. This type of setup keeps labor costs low because given that it's an entire city the competition for jobs is high. You'd have to move to another city/town/district and re-train to do something else.
With wood glue, you fill up a glue spreader machine and as long as it keeps moving and there's enough glue in there, workers can lay up boards and take them straight to the presses all day long. It then cures enough in a few hours that the press can be re-filled.
With epoxy resin, it flash cures at a certain point. Typically anywhere from 20mins-120mins. What I mean by flash cure is that it literally goes from a liquid to a solid over the course of a few seconds. Given that you have to mix resin + hardener together means that your measurements have to be pretty precise to get the level of consistency one would want in a manufacturing process. Once a laid up stack of veneers is in the press, it needs to sit in the press longer as it cures from the outside in. It'd still be somewhat flexible if you were to pull it out too soon.
So where one might be able to lay up 100 boards w/ woodglue and a handful of people in an hour. Doing the same thing with epoxy resin would likely cut your production capability significantly ... unless you add more workers.
There's some objects where epoxy resin is preferred and the extra labor is worth it ... like surfboards (made all over both coasts by US companies), Skis, Snowboards, Snowski's, etc (I won't get into all the car parts!
). These things need to be impervious to water and the elements and epoxy resin is great at that. You'll also notice that all those things cost WAAYYY more than a skateboard deck so it ends up being cost effective. You can formulate resins to be very flexible, or very stiff, and anything in between really. When I started redf skateboards, the first thing I was trying to make were composite decks. Basically the same layup as a VX deck, but with quad axial carbon fiber rather than fiberglass. They would last a very long time, amazing pop and didn't snap very easily ... but people would razor the nose/tail well before the rest of the board was dead.
I personally think epoxy resin makes for a better board because it penetrates the wood fibers and pores much better than wood glue. Delamination issues happen much less frequently because of it. Given how long boards typically last, it is probably overkill though.
One other thing to note, Urea Resin is extremely toxic (has formaldehyde) and special safety measures are required to work with it. That may be what someone was referring to earlier, but it's not banned either, it just has an OSHA guidelines book dedicated to it, haha.
Brandon @ Club Distribution
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Topic: CURRENT WOODSHOP DIRECTORY 2025 + misc deck and board info, help, questions, etc (Read 467953 times)