Epoxy at ClarkCraft, which is a few minutes from my house, on the Niagara River, costs $55 per gallon plus tax. I like the convenience of getting this specialty in gallon size without having to pay shipping charges that could be as much as $10, and I like the one-to-one mix ratio of resin and catalyst (I use plastic water bottles that I cut with my Japanese draw-cut saw to leave a cup-size container with regular ripples in the sides that I use for measuring).

Epoxy has no equal for gap filling and strength; it also has no equal for toxicity and
messiness, and the possibility of sensitization is always there. Sometimes I just want to glue two things together without donning surgical gloves, face mask, long sleeves, hat, and safety glasses,
then mix and use in a hurry to avoid waste. And then there is the question of when to stop monitoring for drips and dribbles and curtains and runs. Often I epoxy at the end of a long session of work to prepare for gluing, and I go inside and clean up, only to find the next time I'm in the shop that the epoxy has made a runny, rockhard mess on surfaces I will have to sand and sand and sand.

Small jobs such as filling a few but crucial screw holes in the hull of a boat that I'm building require the donning of all the safety gear and some attention to the amount to mix and what to do with the excess, if any.

The alternatives to epoxy in my mind include poly glues that call for wetting one of the surfaces to be bonded and glues such as Titebond II that have water resistance but not gap-filling qualities. I have used resorcinal, many years ago, and my father before me used this glue exclusively in prewar and postwar years of backyard boatbuilding. Resorcinal leaves a purplish-reddish line at each glue joint, and it kicks off slowly depending on the temperature. It stains wood in ways that reduce the beauty of varnished surfaces. It demands tight joints and heavy clamping. Epoxy, by contrast, is stronger when there are gaps and bridges gaps effortlessly; clamping is accomplished with a box or two of self-tapping deck screws in sizes of3/4 inch or 1 inch.

Robb White, a frequent contributor to Messing About in Boats, wrote an article about epoxy a few years ago. He says that epoxy will penetrate joints if there is enough heat. He assembles pieces and then ups the heat in his shop or uses a heat source such as a handheld hair dryer to encourage the epoxy to penetrate joints. Mind you, I am relating this from memory, and any lapses or distortions of Robb's approach are mine, not his. I used this approach in the building of my Harmonica canalboat mainly due to entropy: When the time came to seal the edges of the plywood I used for the foredeck, I covered the edges with moulding without any prior coating with epoxy. When I was finished installing the L-moulding that I used to edge the deck and provide a toe-rail effect, I brushed on epoxy on a hot day and made sure that I sealed the joint between the deck and the moulding, hoping that there had also been penetration to the plywood edge. I figured that a fillet-type seal on the moulding would do the job fairly well, but I also was uneasy about my choice.

I understand that strip-built boats can be joined with fasteners and cheap yellow glue such as Carpenter's Glue or Titebond II. These glues clean up with water and don't stain wood, though they will mar a surface if allowed to lay and cure in drips and rings, because of the differences in penetration of varnish, and stain (though why you would ever want to stain wood on a boat is too many for me to figure out).

Epoxy makes fasteners almost redundant after the stuff has cured. The epoxy is stronger at the glue line that the surrounding wood is by nature, and the addition of fasteners is necessary to keep the pieces in proximity after applying the epoxy and waiting for curing to finish. I use bronze ringed boat nails for most of my fastening needs, and after buying some stainless steel screws, and using zinc-coated when I didn't have the stainless sort on hand, I have been trying to avoid screws as much as possible. I do like the way they look, but I have a growing confidence in epoxy alone to hold most boat parts in place. Mind you, I mess about in protected waters, usually the Erie Canal.

After marring the finish of one boat with microballoon-augmented epoxy, I no longer use microballoon additives. I couldn't tell any difference anyway when using the micorballoons. I also don't use Cabosil anymore, though it is higher in my estimation than microballoons. I use wood flour if I want to thicken epoxy, and nothing else. I like its cost and the way it works, and it doesn't alarm me as much as Cabosil does when it gets airborne while my dusk mask is hanging on the wall instead of in place on my face.