So the other night I was dealing with a tough problem on a “commuter” build I’m working on. I couldn’t figure out how to mate the Enerion enclosure I got with a battery to a cool Skateshred deck with rocker and funny concave. There just wasn’t an easy way to get the two flush enough for even the rubber seal/gasket they sent with it. As you can see the deck has a unique rocker in it cresting near the front of the deck.
I stood there like a dumbass and decided to just give up and drink some beer. A local IPA from Track7 if you may know, it hit the spot!
Someone else in the forums posted a link to the perfect self adhesive foam gasket stuff to use on my other “skater” setup and I had that laying around. So I used small strips of it to build up a wall high enough to pool some 20-min epoxy. the idea here is to just get the deck level and then pour in a lot of epoxy and let it pool up and flatten out forming a perfectly flat surface for the enclosure to mount too!
I sanded the deck of course so it bonds well, traced the enclosure on the deck, cut out some foam filler to lay inside the epoxy to take up some extra volume and then blamo, I made this.
I literally took an entire 2x bottles of 20-min epoxy and mixed them together in a cup and then poured it in, it was so simple in the end.
Of course the epoxy doesn’t dry perfectly flat due to surface tension and it’s sort of thick anyway. I let this cure about 3 days, even though 20-min epoxy says it cures in 20 minutes, that’s just to harden, for it to really set up it needs at least 48 hours or so, be patient if you do this.
After I let it set for days and had some more beer I took off the foam “dam” I had built and used power tools like a madman to grind and smooth it to shape so it looked cool. And then I simply painted it. It was about here that I realized that embedding LED’s into the epoxy would have been a great idea. So if you ever have a need to do this, and want a awesome and weatherproof place to install LED’s that can be seen on all four corners, do that before the epoxy cures, ok?
Here she is mocked up for a glamor shot in her natural environment, no beer spilled and the mating problem fixed…on to the next step!
I don’t know what to call this method, I don’t know if it’s been done before. But I was pretty proud of my out-of-the-box approach of using a box to pool up epoxy, lol. I’ll just call it epoxy pools and we’ll open it up to testing, let’s see if this crap holds and doesn’t crack to pieces over time. I choose 20-min epoxy to hopefully get the best bond and avoid the brittleness of the 5-min stuff. I found flexible epoxy once, if you can grind and sand it, that might be even better.