Akemi Akepox 1005 Flowing Epoxy: A Stone Shop Guide

Most of the epoxy in a stone shop is thick on purpose. Knife-grade fillers are formulated to stay where you put them, cartridge adhesives are built to hold a seam without slumping down the joint, and both are the right answer to the problems they were designed for. None of them will travel into a hairline crack, wick along a fissure or soak into a porous, sugary marble. For that you need a product whose whole design intent is the opposite: low viscosity, long open time and enough penetration to reach the parts of the slab you cannot see.

Akepox 1005 is that product in the Akemi range. It is a very fluid, solvent-free two-component epoxy with a modified amine hardener, used to close cracks and pores in natural stone and to consolidate material that is too porous or too fissured to fabricate safely as delivered. It cures light and transparent, which makes it best suited to light-coloured stone, and it grinds and polishes cleanly once hard. Used properly it turns marginal slabs into usable ones. Used carelessly, particularly with respect to temperature, it produces a soft, cloudy mess that has to be ground out.

Where a Flowing Epoxy Belongs in the Shop

The decision between a flowing epoxy and a knife-grade or cartridge product comes down to whether you are filling a defect you can see and reach, or reaching a defect you cannot. A visible chip with an open profile is knife-grade work: you want a material that stays put, builds to a proud surface and can be dressed flush. A hairline crack running through the body of a slab, a network of fine fissures, or a face that is generally porous and friable is not knife-grade work at all, because the product will bridge the surface and leave the interior untouched.

A flowing product goes the other way. Because Akepox 1005 is highly penetrative, it travels along the crack rather than sitting on top of it, and it soaks into pore structure rather than skinning over it. The consequence is that you are impregnating a volume of stone rather than filling a void. That is a different repair with a different success criterion: you are not judging it on how invisible the surface line is, you are judging it on whether the slab has stopped flexing at that point.

The second application is slab strengthening. Porous and fissured slabs that would not survive handling, cutting or a long unsupported span can be consolidated with a flowing epoxy across the whole face or back, and brittle material can be reinforced further by laying spun-glass fabric into the wet resin. That is the same principle as the resin-and-mesh backing applied at the processing plant, done in your own shop, on the specific piece that needs it, at the moment you discover it needs it.

The third consideration is optical. Akepox 1005 cures light and transparent with only a slight tendency to discolour, and it is weather-resistant, which makes it a reasonable choice for exterior work as well as interior. The transparency is why it suits light stones best. On a black granite or a dark quartzite, a clear resin in a crack reads as a light line unless it is tinted, so plan on colouring for dark material and treat the untinted product as a light-stone tool.

Mixing, Temperature and Getting It Into the Stone

Mixing Discipline at 4:1 by Weight

The mixing ratio is 4:1 by weight, which in practice means 100 g of component A to 25 g of component B, or 7:2 by volume, which is 175 ml to 50 ml. Weight is the more reliable route because the two components have different densities: component A is 1.13 g/cm3 and component B is 1.00 g/cm3, so eyeballing volumes introduces error that eyeballing weights does not. Keep a digital scale at the mixing bench, zero it with the empty pot on it, and weigh both components into the same container.

Ratio errors are the most common cause of a batch that never reaches full hardness. Too little hardener leaves unreacted resin that stays soft and gummy, and adding more hardener later does not rescue it because it will not disperse into material that has already begun to gel. Mix thoroughly, scrape the pot walls and base, and transfer to a second clean container before use.

Temperature Governs Everything

More than any other variable, temperature decides how this product behaves. The working time for a 125 g batch is roughly 30 to 35 minutes at 15 °C (59 °F), 20 to 25 minutes at 20 °C (68 °F), 5 to 10 minutes at 30 °C (86 °F), and only 3 to 5 minutes at 40 °C (104 °F). Mix smaller batches as the temperature climbs, and mix more of them.

The lower limit is absolute rather than advisory: do not use this product below 15 °C (59 °F), because it will not harden sufficiently. If the shop is cold, warm the space, warm the stone, or wait. There is no additive and no technique that makes a below-minimum application acceptable.

Pre-Warming, Colouring and Grind Timing

Warming the stone is the most useful technique in the whole workflow, and it does two separate jobs. Pre-warming the stone to 60 to 70 °C (140 to 158 °F) considerably increases how deeply the resin penetrates, because the resin thins as it meets the warm surface and the air in the pore structure expands and then contracts, drawing resin inward as the stone cools. It also accelerates hardening dramatically, which is how a shop turns an overnight job into a same-shift one.

Published data for Akepox 1005; confirm against the current technical data sheet for your batch.

Colouring is straightforward but bounded. Akepox Colouring Concentrates or Stone Ink can be added to a maximum of 5 percent, and that ceiling exists because pigment is not part of the cure chemistry. Push past it and you dilute the reacting system, weakening the cured resin and risking an incomplete cure. Tint the mixed resin rather than one component, and test against an offcut, since wet colour and cured colour are not the same.

Timing the grind matters as much as timing the mix. The product is ready to grind and polish in about 24 hours at 20 °C, or in roughly 3 hours at 60 °C if the stone is pre-warmed. Intermediate figures on pre-warmed stone run to 12 hours at 30 °C, 6 hours at 40 °C and 4 hours at 50 °C. Grinding early is a false economy: partially cured resin loads abrasives and finishes to a different gloss than the stone around it.

Strengthening Slabs and Reinforcing Brittle Material

Consolidating a whole slab is a different operation from filling a crack, and it starts with the surface. The stone has to be dry and clean, because any moisture in the pore structure occupies the space the resin needs and interferes with the bond. Slabs that have been wet-cut need genuine drying time, and a stone that feels dry to the hand can still be damp at depth.

For strengthening, coverage of roughly 100 to 200 g/m² is the published guide, and the practical technique is to flood the surface and let the material find its own way in rather than trying to force it. Pour or squeegee it out, keep the surface wet while it is still soaking, and add resin to any area that goes dull as it absorbs. When absorption slows and the surface stays glossy, the stone has taken what it will take, and any excess should be pulled off before it gels rather than left to cure as a film.

Mesh reinforcement is the next step up for brittle slabs. Spun-glass fabric laid into the wet resin and wetted out fully turns a resin coat into a composite, and the tensile contribution of the glass is what carries a slab through handling and installation. Work the fabric down with a roller or a spreader until no white dry patches remain, because dry fabric is a delamination waiting to happen.

The mechanical figures give you a sense of what the cured resin contributes. Bending strength is in the region of 60 to 70 N/mm², approximately 8,700 to 10,150 psi, and tensile strength is 35 to 40 N/mm², approximately 5,075 to 5,800 psi. Those are properties of the resin rather than of the repaired assembly, which is always governed by the bond to the stone and the geometry of the defect.

Know when consolidation is not the answer. A slab with a through crack that has already moved, or one with a defect running across a narrow sink rail, needs mechanical reinforcement as well: rodding, a backing strip or a change to the layout. Resin restores continuity but it does not add section, and a fabricator who treats a flowing epoxy as a substitute for a rod is storing up a callback. Use the resin to make the stone whole and use steel or rod to make it strong.

Order of operations pays here. Consolidate before you cut wherever you can, because a slab that is already bonded survives the saw, the router and the trip to site far better than one consolidated after it has been reduced to finished pieces. Repairing after fabrication is always possible, but it is repair rather than prevention, and it usually happens under time pressure with the job already promised.

Storage, Safety and Shop Practice

Storage is undemanding but not optional. Shelf life is at least 24 months when the product is kept dry and cool, between 5 and 25 °C (41 and 77 °F), in the closed original container. Two conditions do the damage: heat, which shortens the life of component A, and moisture, which reacts with amine hardeners and can leave a crust in the container. Close the lids properly, keep the pots off a cold concrete floor and out of direct sun, and date them when they arrive.

Cold storage in winter creates a trap worth naming. A container that has been sitting near the shop door at five degrees is not ready to use even if the shop itself is warm enough, because the resin will be thick and slow to mix and the batch will start well below the working temperature you assumed. Bring containers into the conditioned part of the shop the day before you need them, and let them come up to temperature in their own time rather than warming them aggressively.

Personal protection is the standard epoxy regime and it is worth taking seriously with a low-viscosity product, because thin resin runs, drips and finds skin more readily than a paste does. Nitrile gloves rather than latex, eye protection, and long sleeves when you are flooding a slab. Amine hardeners are skin sensitisers, and sensitisation is cumulative and effectively permanent once it develops. Work in a ventilated area and consult the current safety data sheet for the specific handling and disposal requirements in your jurisdiction.

The food-contact question comes up regularly on kitchen work and deserves a precise answer. The product is classified as harmless to health for bonded natural and artificial stone in food contact applications when properly applied, and it is solvent-free. The qualifier matters: that classification assumes a correctly mixed, fully cured repair. An under-catalysed or under-temperature batch is not a fully cured repair, which is another reason to get the ratio and the temperature right on a worktop.

Tools and clean-up follow the usual epoxy rules. Clean equipment while the resin is liquid, because once it has gelled the only options are mechanical. Keep a dedicated set of mixing pots, spreaders and rollers for flowing work and do not share them with polyester or cyanoacrylate products.

Finally, keep records. Note the batch, the ambient and slab temperatures, the batch size, whether you tinted and at what percentage, and how the repair performed at the grinding stage. Over a year that log tells you what batch size actually works in your shop at each season, and it makes training a new operator a matter of handing over a sheet.

You can see current pricing and pack options for Akemi Akepox 1005 flowing two-component epoxy on the product page, and the colouring concentrates, spun-glass fabric, mixing supplies and knife-grade companions that go with it are in the full catalog. If you are unsure which product suits a particular repair, ask before you mix.