Wood Epoxy Saves the Day!

We recently just finished the restoration of Mother Bethel Church in Society Hill.

The biggest unknown was the condition of the sanctuary windows. How bad would they be?

From ground level, they look bad but salvageable.

Well, as it turns out, they were worse than bad. The water had really infiltrated and rotted out much of the circles. once nature gets a foothold, the deterioration is incredibly rapid. It’s a feedback loop: the more deterioration, the faster it deteriorates.

As with all products of the scope, we wanted to test our methodology first. Make sure it is sound; Make sure it’s going to last. Then rinse and repeat for the next six weeks!

To re-create the circles with actual wood was going to cost way too much money. The only answer was Abatron wood epoxy.

So we did our normal demolition: scraping and sanding and cleaning, removing any loose material to get us down to a somewhat solid substrate. Then oil primer to seal everything in. We tinted the primer light gray.

Then we got to work with the wood epoxy. Since the material is made of two parts, it’s important to get the ratio correct. Too much harder and it dries too fast. Too little and it doesn’t dry it all. We found the sweet spot and used a little less hardener. This gave us the opportunity to work with the material. To shape it.

The goals is to recreate the wood. A person should not look up at these windows and think anything but “wow, that’s beautiful woodworking!”

Here is an example of the epoxy in action:

If applied correctly, the epoxy doesn’t really need to be sanded. Then, we re-primed to create the primer sandwich, then applied caulk anywhere there could possibly be water infiltrating.

Then we applied Sherwin-Williams emerald gloss paint.