I read some earlier posts about choosing an expoxy. Someone suggested that real-world examples were wanting so I will offer my thoughts.

I have used West, System 3, RAKA, Everdure (sp?) Unitex "pro-poxy" (intended for concrete repair) a 2 part epoxy paint (intended for food service surfaces), some stuff from New Zealand and I'm sure a few others that I've failed to recall. I have built a variety of watercraft and other things using epoxy including, a canoe, some skiffs, paddles, sweeps, yacht cabin, rebuilt a 42 ft. tri, repaired rust on my car, built furniture etc... Perhaps my most controversial "method" was to use the above-mentioned paint as my resin (after the basic structure was complete) when building a skiff from 1/4" interior luan. This skiff weighed about 90 lbs when finished and was fitted with a 15 hp outboard. It saw the roughest use you can imagine, used daily as a yacht dingy for a family of 5+dog and occassional coastal jaunts, at times in rough seas and even once or twice during a Typhoon. Typhoon PAKA (no not RAKA) ended up destroying it with a fair sized tree, so I guess it wasn't built quite strong enough :) but until that time it served our family very well.

While each brand has unique characteristics (some types seem to develop more blush, all seem to differ in viscoscity, gel times can range from minutes to days (7 days for the paint!)) and require different technique. Even though nearly all of my projects saw hard, daily us, I can't think of a single failure of properly applied(and often miss-applied) epoxy, regardless of the brand or type, even when using epoxy designed for other uses.

The bottom line seems me to be, it don't really matter at all.....

karl