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Delamination/bubble?

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pods8

Member
Joined
Nov 7, 2010
Messages
24
Location
Everett, WA
Hi all, hoping the wise minds here could potentially weigh in thoughts. I used the resources here quite a while ago and kicked off a camper project out of foam core. It has dragged out (that is life!) but I was hoping to wrap it up this spring but ran into an issue.

The project has been in the garage the whole time however the other day it was near the front of the door with the door open and strong sun shining on the front of it which got quite warm to the touch and now there are a couple delaminated spots/bubbles. I had some delamination/bubbling occur prepaint while I was joining panels I had made together and was using a heat blanket due to winter temps to help things cure and put too much heat on things. I cut out and reglassed those areas at that stage and was more careful about the heat blanket usage. But it made me fear/wonder about the sun...

Well the front edge just showed issues and now I'm really worried. At this point I'm thinking of putting the painted top half out in the sun and really see what happens before trying to finish the rest of this project. I figured I would check in here if there are any thoughts or ideas in general or before I do that because that may be the point of no return (massive delamination and thus structural instability).

The core is extruded polystyrene (foamular 600) and I'm seeing references from the surfboard community that XPS in sun tends to have delamination (they think its the blowing gas expanding, dunno personally). I scratched it up with 80grit before laminating to encourage a bond, skimmed it with epoxy (using US composites) then laid my glass onto the wet epoxy and laid wet it out with more epoxy, then the next layer, etc. Some of the structure has 2 layers of 8.6oz glass and some has 3layers (pretty much all the exterior is 3 layers). Those are the broad strokes.

Any thoughts/ideas?


It was the leading edge poking out of the garage that got hot and bubbled it two spots (~6" wide bubbles):
861657B8-B646-4F7C-B725-D229528F0231-12537-000009FD333CD889_zps27f89e1f.jpg


FYI this is what the project is ultimately going towards (once the bottom was done):
CF8C34B2-910C-46C7-966B-5BB0F256C7F1_zpser3vzyke.jpg
 
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