: i'm building a cheap s&g canoe to leave at my shack in the hills. i have some
: polyester resin that cost me nothing. i am thinking of useing it for this
: boat. my question is can polyester resin be used as a glue? something
: similar to the way we use epoxy and coloidal silica as glue?
: tia;
: daren.....

The original stitch and glue process was designed around the available resin at that time, which was polyester resin. When epoxy resin hit the market it replaced polyester in many plans. Some plans can be modified to allow the use of polyester resin, and some need no modification at all.

BUT, that is stitch and glue construction, which makes use of a relatively wide piece of fiberglass cloth which is saturated in resin, and works over a relatively large bonding area.

For general wood working use a polyester resin is not considered to be as good a glue as your typical yellow woodworking glues.

Unlike a lot of glues and epoxy resin) which soak into the pores of the wood, polyester resin sits on the surface. So for wood, polyester is not in the top 10 choices as an adhesive.

On the otherhand, if you were gluing a piece of plastic, or patching and old glass-reinforced polyester resin boat ( what is commonly called a "fiberglas boat") then the polyester resin would be a fairly good 'glue' provided the bonding area was large enough and reinforced enough. A better adhesive would be epoxy resin, but here we are talking about having fewer choices, and even the worst choice is still one of the top two options.

Hopefully this has not confused you greatly.

PGJ