A pigment mill that ended up in swimming pools
Atlas Minerals & Chemicals started in 1892 in Lincoln, New Jersey, where Maximillian F. Wirtz ground red shale and sold it as coloring pigment. In 1917 he moved the operation to Mertztown in Berks County, Pennsylvania, to sit closer to the raw material. The plant has been there ever since.
What followed was a long run of corrosion-resistant materials for industry: sulfur cements for pickling tanks in 1935, the first American chemical-resistant resin cement in 1937, and in 1949 ALFANE, the first epoxy mortar sold in the United States. Pool putty is a consumer-sized descendant of that work. The chemistry that patches an acid tank floor turns out to be good at patching a pool.
In 1978 the employees bought the company from ESB, and it has been employee owned since. The Epoxybond pool putty tubes came first. The Single-Stick format arrived in 2021 for people with one crack rather than a maintenance contract.
What this site is
A reference for one product line. Every figure here is lifted from the Epoxybond technical data sheets or from the product listings, and where the two disagree the page says so rather than picking the flattering one. The cured color is a good example: the listing says yellow, the data sheet says white.
We did not build a test pool to write these pages and we do not pretend otherwise. The numbers come off the data sheets, the photographs come off the listings, and the star rating is the one buyers left. The picker and the calculator do arithmetic on published volumes. The section on what the putty will not fix is as long as it is because that is what the data sheet supports.
Buying
This site does not sell anything. The buttons open the product listing at Amazon, and everything from that point on, price, stock, delivery, returns, is handled there under their terms. We earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through those links, which is what pays for the site.