Can You Glue King Starboard?

Jared 00:07 Alright guys, so we've got a really good question from one of our customers comes up quite often I think, Matt, it's can you glue King StarBoard? And if so what adhesive would you use?

Andrew 00:15 How many times? Have you answered that?

Matt 00:16 A number of times too many times can't count them.

Andrew 00:20 So that's it?

Matt 00:21 It depends, right? We don't do anything with gluing storyboard here it about Outfitters, but yet, there are customers who I've spoken with who have had mixed results with gluing, storyboard for whatever their particular application is, right? I've seen I've seen people who use cover plates to cover an existing hole.

I've seen customers who use StarBoard and bore holes into the back of it and fill it with a ton of adhesive and then use it for like a transom mount transducer adapter.

Jared 00:54 Actually, now that you said that there's that vendor that I've been working to reach out to that's using the same kind of concept, but again, not really weight bearing, right.

Matt 01:00 Right I mean, it's got to pull a transducer through the water, but you know, we might be talking about 40 50 miles an hour tops, in some, in some cases, a lot less. But it's in one direction; it's not carrying the weight of a person. I mean, you can put your hand in the water and drag it through at those speeds right.

Not saying you want to do that regularly, but yeah, King StarBoard. It depends, right? The only thing that we use an adhesive on StarBoard for here is for our helm pads. When we use the PE foam the shark deck on our helm risers.

Jared 01:32 Which is just like a pill and stick adhesive.

Andrew 01:34 3m adhesive yeah and even then I think what we do is we do milled down the surface that it's going against, to so that you can't, you know, kind of peel it back with your finger. You know, I've got a nine year old and the question is, if he wanted to get it off, could he get it off? And I think with most adhesives with StarBoards, High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) material doesn't accept the adhesive really?

Well, I think the answer is going to be yes, he wants to get it off, you know, and so for that reason, I, I say you can't glue King StarBoard for anything structural, you know, like you use the cover plate example, the nice thing you have when you have a cover plate, is you've got real big surface area that you could really put a lot of adhesive in, lay it against the fiberglass.

And will it still be there, weeks, months, years, you'll probably but here's what you couldn't do, you really couldn't take and build something like if you're trying to build a box, just because there's not really much surface area that you're applying the glue to. So you are from a practical application standpoint, for what we do in our manufacturing facility, you know, we don't glue any King StarBoard now.

There are ways to weld King StarBoard where there's High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) welding rods that you can weld StarBoard I don't think that's the best option because there's no real way to make it look that nice that you can weld metals and then sand it down and you're powder coated.

Jared 02:55 There are some builders that are doing that when building full boats out of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE).

Matt 02:59 Yeah, there are at the I don't know what their manufacturing processes at this point, but they are like fully welded High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) holes

Andrew 03:06 We’ve had some boxes welded, specifically like the shells of boxes welded for waterproofing applications. And don't get me wrong again, going back to adhesives on StarBoard, we recommend if someone's mounting a door or a tackle box, we recommend they use an elastomeric sealant around the edge of the frame.

But we're not doing that. So that structurally is holding it in place. You're doing that so that you avoid water running down the fiberglass behind the frame. So it'll adhere to it. You know, it just isn't necessarily the best structural thing.

Jared 03:40 And there's other options too, right? I mean, I remember when I first started here, we met a guy at Ibex that had a glue but there were some restrictions to it, right? It had to be kept in a refrigerator. So it didn't you know, from a production capacity for us, that's not something we can do. But you know, back to your other point where, you know, you would have to have somebody holding up each piece over time till it cured. It would cause a lot issues.

Andrew 04:02 It doesn't lend itself to production that yeah, here's another thing. If you have an application, that thing really needs to be glued in place. You know, acrylic accepts glue beautifully, right? Yeah. So all day long, you can glue up acrylic, I mean, you can go up to pieces of acrylic and if you know how to do it, right you have clamps, you can glue it and then polish it out to where you don't even see a seam.

We do that for some big transom doors. So yeah, if someone let's say they were doing a thin shim for a speaker trim ring right, and they really wanted to glue it they didn't want fasteners, just use acrylic and their relative you know, it is more expensive material.

But it's glossy, you know, and you could glue it in place, you're really well whereas I'd be a little bit nervous, you know, especially if you're mounting your speaker, potentially expensive speaker and you're running and you said I wanted to glue StarBoard I don't know. That's on the

Jared 04:51 Hope you got a tough speaker.

Andrew 04:53 Yeah that's…

Matt 04:55 Definitely not making that observation.

Jared 04:56 So Where we'll leave it is we feel like it just kind of depends was on the application. We're not using it in our build process here. A lot of times it worked out right.

Andrew 05:05 And to answer the secondary question of what adhesive would you recommend I, there's not any that I have personal success with, and so I can't really recommend anything.

Matt 05:15 I would say that, you know, from what I've seen, I've used 3m 5200 on StarBoard, you know, it holds to it a little bit. It's more it's better for like a waterproofing type. We've seen people use silicone sealants in between the frames and the fiberglass that does okay, but I mean, it will pull right off.

Yeah, the elastomeric I've found is what holds the best but even still, you know, we took those samples we had three inch by three inch blocks of StarBoard and stuck the flat sides together, and I couldn't pull them apart with my hands. But you know, we did get it apart with a screwdriver.

You don't have much leverage. You don't have a lot of leverage there. But I you know, once it was apart, I was able to rub it off with my thumb. Yeah, you know, it. It took a little effort, but it held on better than all of the other stuff that I've used at this point on to untreated StarBoard.

Andrew 06:01 So mechanical fasteners if you can.

Matt 06:04 Absolutely.