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I recently read somewhere that using the yellow ABS/PVC cement as a primer, before epoxy, will greatly improve adhesion.
Glenn, good to hear from you.
But your question is like putting the cart before the horse…
There’s other factors like is this a flat piece or tubular?
Can you drill holes into it for the resin to rivet itself on?
Are you using the Epoxy to glue pieces of these material together?
Or are you fliberglassing / CF mat or cloth onto these materials?
Is ABS and PVC the only plastics that you are looking at or if you can give us an idea what you are doing, maybe for us to suggest an alternate plastics to work with?
I would need to machine the PVC or ABS. I’m leaning towards PVC over ABS.
The PVC/ABS peice would be flat where the epoxy and regular 4oz and maybe some chopped up strand would be bonding to. It has to be waterproof. And able to handle some flexing. And cosmetically pleasing to the eye.
It is an insert into a composite sandwich skin for a gore-tex vent. The gore-tex vent would be then screwed into the PVC/ABS. Since the composite sandwich skin has a balsa core of less than 1/8" and would not be suited for tapping the threads into. Therefore in comes the PVC/ABS for this reason. And I’m going to make the PVC/ABS insert a bit thicker and have a recess to that the vent is flush deck.
My friend who has a small mill and lathe in his garage have been testing both materials for the fit of the vent. Now I’d just like to know if anyone has any insight into bonding issues with PVC/ABS and epoxy.
http://www.gore.com/MungoBlobs/677/129/membrane_vents_M12x1.5.pdf
Thanks Fan O Zakk I’ll do some testing of that 
Which I done of both already and it seems pretty good. So maybe I’m ok with just the slightly roughed up surface as I have tested so far.
Thanks guys.
Glenn
I guess other plastics but which ones are the best at adhering to epoxy? When I think of most “plastics” and epoxy I think “release”. I don’t want release!
Any soft plastic such as PVC or ABS is not going to be that easy to bond anything to. Unless your application requires the plastic to flex, I think it might be an idea to look at alternatives.
ABS is better than PVC in an outside enviroment.
No Epoxy resin will flex that I know of.
Epoxy resin can’t be used on FG mat as Epoxy does not melt out the styrene binding agnets out of the FG mat.
Sounds like PP (the best choice IMO)or LDPE might be a better choice (for flex) with drilled holes to let the resin drip thru and rivet it self on with PER resin with flex additive in it.
I’m starting to think it might be best to just lay up some fiberglass and epoxy to make what I want and just machine that. Thanks for all the replies!
If you want to lay up glass using epoxy resin systems, you will need to get glass with a powder based binding agent, as epoxy wont disolve binders designed to work with poly resin systems.
But if you need to reinforce your product, why not get some ready made composite material in sheet form, and bond that into your lay up?
Yeah I know about binder and epoxy, thanks.
Wwhere to get the ready-made stuff? It needs to be about 5/8" thick.