Saving Your 801 Roller Frame

by Captain James R. Watson

Photo at top: How a simple S hook can save your 801 Roller Frame.

When you’ve completed a coating task using an 801 Roller Frame and 800 Roller Cover, what next? The frame is reusable. But if you leave it resting in the pan while the residual epoxy cures, you‘ll probably ruin both the reusable pan and the frame. If you lay the roller and frame on a workbench, it will be stuck there the next day. Here is a simple solution to this problem that will allow you to reuse your frame again and again.

Setting the roller on a piece of plastic will bring you closer to success but in any instance where the frame rests on a surface while the epoxy cures, the cover will accumulate epoxy where it touches the surface. This accumulated epoxy forms at the end of the plastic roller, and then cures. Attempts to remove epoxied roller covers may break the frame. Cutting the cover off with a saw is tedious and may damage both the frame and your saw.

Removing the roller cover from the frame before the epoxy cures is one answer, but that can be difficult to do difficult because wet epoxy is slippery.

After 30 years of confronting this issue, I’ve found the best solution. First, remove the excess epoxy from the foam roller cover by rolling it on cardboard or scrap wood. Next, hang the frame and roller cover from an S hook. The hook should be connected at the turn in the frame (as shown in the photo above) and allowed to cure that way. With the frame hung this way, any excess epoxy runs to the ‘open’ end of the cover.

Once the epoxy is cured, remove the cover from the frame by simply pulling on the cover. With this approach, I‘ve been able to reuse the same roller frame many times.