We have, as you might expect, a Favorite Cheese Slicer of no particular provenance. Being made of cheap pot metal, it left black smudges wherever it went and, decades ago, I coated it with bright red rubbery grip material. Recently, the coating became lumpy and peeling off the loose sections revealed a definite problem:
Cheese slicer – aluminum corrosion
Vigorous scrubbing with a foam sanding block and a Scotchbrite pad, interspersed with rotary wire brushing, removed the corrosion and left a slightly pitted metal frame. Protip: scrub under water and wire-brush with a vacuum hose to keep the dust under control.
A pair of 6-32 screws, nuts, and brass sleeves, with two oil dots protecting the frame threads, provided hand grips while I wiped it down with denatured alcohol and coated it with XTC-3D epoxy:
Cheese slicer – epoxy curing
Turns out the mixing stick worked quite well to cover the entire thing, as the epoxy does a great job of leveling itself. I suppose wasting a tiny brush would be more professional, but …
It quietly dripped excess epoxy into a strategically placed trash can for about ten minutes. I wiped off the final drip before the epoxy solidified, leaving a smooth layer over the end of the handle:
Cheese slicer – reassembled
It’s back in service and works as well as ever, with a handle now smooth to the touch. I suppose I could have tinted the epoxy to hide the metal, but we regard those corrosion pits as beausage.
I’ve slathered XTC-3D on some 3D printed parts, but have no idea how durable it is; this should serve as an accelerated survival test under rather harsh usage.
The instruction sheet says XTC-3D isn’t the most transparent epoxy they make and, indeed, the layer left in the mixing pan came out more hazy than I expected:
XTC-3D Epoxy – thin cured layer
They point out the haze doesn’t matter for thin surface coatings, which is certainly true.
