REFLECTOR: Jeffco

[Christopher Barber]

Actually, I have a brand new three gallon kit, however, since I am about to
try to sell it I don't think it would help the sale if I opened it up.  I
can make you a deal, however, still may be a bit much for your need.  I paid
about $450.00 several weeks ago from AS&S (with shipping etc). That being
said, I may have a pint or so left from my original purchase from about five
years ago....but, alas, this is the batch that failed.  It may have been
nothing to do with the Jeffco, but who knows.  If you are in the Houston
area, feel free to stop by and pick this bit up.

After discussions with Velocity (Scott Swing as well as others not a
Velocity.  I sent a sample of my failure to Velocity a while back too) I
have decided not to use Jeffco again to line my tanks.  I feel I am
eliminating a failure point I have already had.  If y'all remember, I had a
complete failure of Jeffco in my stakes (pealed off) and am in the final
stages of completely re-doing my strake interiors.

Scott Swing and I discussed that they started using Jeffco to solve a
problem that they had never actually seen, only heard SPECULATION about. (of
course they have never seen Jeffco peel off like in my case either)  They
started to use Jeffco to address customer concerns about additives in fuels
such as diesels (such as for the DeltaHawk) and now ethanol, however, their
experience has been that the concerns have never actually come to fruition.
He recalls only one incident that pure ethanol was used and that plane had
problems, BUT, he states they do not know that ethanol was the problems AND
that he does not believe that EZPoxy was the type of epoxy that was even
used on that plane.  IIRC it may have been Danny's original prototype....but
I may be mistaken.

My thought is that with straight EZpoxy I MAY have issues that have as yet
never developed only speculated about.  However, with Jeffco I have had a
failure and MAY again (even though the failure cause has NOT been
determined...high humidity, bad batch of Jeffco, dryer lint...the project
was in my garage during strake build as for some reason dryer connections
are in the garage in Houston, etc) and if that failure occurs then I still
have the same problem of floating Jeffco with the EZPoxy that is sitting
under the Jeffco.  Heck, If it happens again and I have to rip my strakes
open again I may get an RV guy over to fab aluminum tanks into my strakes
<yikes>.

Scott further stated that someone (someone they know somewhat well, maybe a
builder???) is building fiberglass fuel tanks for motorcycles out in
California.  This person (sorry I can't recall the name) did pretty
extensive research into various epoxies and concluded that the EZ10/83/84
EZPoxy was the best for use with his fuel tanks with current fuels.

I have uncounted hours devoted to wrestling with this decision.  We will
see.

Let me know if'n you may be around Houston to pick up the bit of old Jeffco.

All the best,

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: reflector-bounces at tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-bounces at tvbf.org]On
Behalf Of Alex Balic
Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 7:50 PM
To: 'Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list'
Subject: REFLECTOR: Jeffco


Anyone out there have some unused Jeffco they might be able to part with? I
had some left over from my tanks but gave it away last year to someone
needing some, and now I am in the same boat- I was working on getting my
engine running, filled up the sump a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that I
had a slight leak around my fuel sensor- I over tightened it and it broke,
so I removed the sump and extracted the treaded piece from the bung, but I
just happed to notice what looked like some cloth just inside the hole, I
should not have been there, so I probed it and it was not hard, so I got an
o-ring pick on it and pulled it partially up through the hole- not a good
thing to see some softened epoxy coated cloth in my sump, so I opened the
tank up with my air saw, and found that everything that had be constructed
from the non- structural epoxy ( the aluminum inserts for the hard points
were put in with that per the manual) and since I had the epoxy left, I used
it to put 2 layers bid over them inside- anyway, the slurry that I used to
set the hard points was the consistency of stale cheese, and the 2 bid cover
lay-ups were soft- so I pulled everything out, and ground it down and re-set
the hard points with JB weld which I know is fuel proof- but I need some
jeffco to re-coat the inside and to use to seal the back to the front again-
anyone out there have a pint or so to spare, please let me  know- BTW I was
using MO-Gas, but even with the ethanol, not sure why that epoxy softened
like that- good thing I used 100% jeffco on the main tanks to make
everything, but I will keep an eye on that after fueling them.


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