Years back, I had RAKA send me some glass samples. I never bought from them because the weave was too fine. (I do use their epoxy) They might have changed since then. I don't like any super fine weave cloth for the reasons you mention. There's not enough space for the epoxy to hold.

I also did some tear test. The normal weave fabrics always held much better than their fine weave counterparts.

Your problem could be many things, one of which might be the fine weave. Also, sand your epoxy and see if it still gums up the paper or is it creating some powder. (Maybe the epoxy is not fully curred.)

When you use an open weave cloth (really just normal cloth) it's almost like the epoxy creates little spikes in the spaces holding the fabric. I know MAS makes a good product. If you could try a few test lay-ups with the same cloth and a fast MAS epoxy and see if the results differ. Also go to a boating store and buy a chunk of normal weave cloth and do a compairson.

As someone else mentioned, you also might have starved the cloth by squeegeeing (sp?) to hard.

Best of luck,

Jay