All About Epoxy and Resin in Woodworking

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to the shop today we're gonna be talking about resins and epoxies now I know a lot of woodworkers out there are nassima to anything a resin or epoxy it's just horrible for woodworking well I really want to go through this and show a bunch of different uses and how they can be applied and which epoxies get used in which situations hopefully I can clear this up a little bit and answer some questions so let's dive into this sticky situation [Music] so first off today we're going to be looking at a lot of different epoxies here and this is really only scratching the surface of different variabilities and different types out there and I'm not going to be able to cover everything about epoxies in here I'm just going to take you through what I commonly use and what are going to be commonly used in a wood shop I'm gonna try and leave links to all of the epoxies that I use down in the description below so if you see something you like hop on down there and take a look at it now first off I'm gonna start by giving a little bit of disclaimer here I am NOT an epoxy expert there are people out there who devote their lives to this and even then there are so many different variations and different capabilities and different mixtures that sometimes that can be well a lot of information so today we're just going to be kind of narrowing it down to the things that I normally use in the shop so we're going to talk about the particular product how it's used different ins and outs of it where it's good where it's not and all of that information so let's dive in and start going through these so first let's talk about your simple five-minute epoxy you'll find this in any big-box store and these ones are really great for when you just need a little bit of epoxy just need to connect two pieces together and this is easy because it's one plunger that pushes out both Part A and Part B and equal amounts so you can squeeze it out grab a toothpick or a popsicle stick and mix it up quickly if ever I have a piece splinter off and I want to reconnect it this is probably what I'm going to be grabbing it's just five minutes so I can clamp it in place five minutes later come back and continue working the other nice thing about these is you can get them in just about any time ratio ten minute twenty five minute thirty minutes our you can get them super clear you can get them flexible one so if you have something that you know you're working with plastic or something that just needs a little bit more hold power or needs to be a little more flexible you can get these in just about any type or ratio you want and I probably have four or five different types but the most common ones I use are just the simple clear five minute epoxy then there's the next step up when you need something a little bit more you need a holding power you need you know basically an actual glue resin just a quick fix oh that's where I like to get this Devcon home this is a very quick epoxy just mixing equal parts you just have to make sure you put a little bit of this a little bit of this don't worry about being exact just make a pile on this one and make a pile of this one it's about the same size mix them together with a toothpick or a popsicle stick and you're good to go now normally a lot of mixing these I'm going to put out a piece of tape on the bench and I'll squirt those onto the tape and I'll mix them up on the tape that way when I'm done I just peel up the tape and throw it away and it's very quick and easy way to mix up just a little bit and these particular bottles we usually last a year or two and very rarely do I ever go through an entire bottle but it's like ten bucks total they're relatively cheap and it's good stuff next we're gonna start getting into some other epoxies that are a little bit different and you'll see I have quite a bit from total boat they have a huge huge variety of epoxies and about half of the epoxy to hand on hand come from total boat because they are well they're one of the best epoxy mixer makers out there they make all different kinds for all different purposes and the ones I'm showing you here are just the scratch of the surface this one I like because it is very quick and it's very easy if ever I have a large structural connection to make this is what I'm gonna grab now the nice thing about this it's a it is a very very thick epoxy very very strong epoxy and this is designed for boat Timbers things that are going to be in the salt water they're going to be in a moist environment they're going to be needing to be structural this is what you want for it the other nice thing about this is it's very thick it has a good gap filling capability to it so if the joints aren't perfectly perfect this will hold up and the nice thing about this is it's actually a tube there's there's two different chambers in here with Part A and Part B and when you push this it pushes out equal amounts through this tip and you can screw on an applicator tip here that will actually mix them together so you don't have to be mixing it on the floor you just put this in here and you pump it out to where you want it just like in a now these tips are only one use so you're going to need to get a bag of them but these once you put the cap back on they will stay for a long time and woodworking I've only had a couple opportunities use this one but if ever I'm doing a large outdoor joinery item this is what I'm going to be grabbing it fills gaps it goes in large spaces it pumps out quick and easy it's just a great great glue to have on hand I want to talk about these next two together we have the West system epoxy and we have total Bo at high performance these are your structural glues these are the glues that are incredibly powerful if you want to put two joints together and never pull them apart this is what you use these are so structural that back when I was building a four-seat airplane we were building a four seat 200 mile-an-hour airplane out of fiberglass and resin we used West System epoxy because this is the tried and true this is an incredibly strong epoxy with known parameters it has this much strength and it is very very good for any time you have a structural member anything you're going to be trusting your life to these structural epoxies are what you want west system is the more tried-and-true older method and so a lot of people really trust it because it's known the total boat is a little bit newer and so it's a little less known but a lot of the tests that I've seen and the information I'm showing that this is actually a little bit stronger a little bit our 'full a little bit longer lasting and a little bit better glue now for the woodworker you're generally not going to use this I know a lot of woodworkers who will get one set of one or the other and it will last them for 5-10 years they they will sit there and work for a long long time the pumps wear out before the epoxy itself goes bad and with the West system as well they also have their own pumps I haven't opened up these yet because I'm almost out of my West system and soon as I'm down to that then I put my pumps into the total boat and be experimenting with that more but for most woodworkers one of these two sets will last you for just about ever now one of the things with the West system the 105 resin you then mix in a hardener so one pump of this equals one pump of this and the hardener then comes with two different variants there's a slow hardener and a fast hardener and so with the slow hardener you have about a couple hour until it sets with the slow harder hardener you come back 24 hours later and that has set and then you can kind of mix and match so if you put two pumps in the resin in you can put one pump of the slow and one pump of the heart and you can get a speed that's halfway in between the two and so it gives you a lot of flexibility with that the only downside is if you are gonna be mixing in color you have to know that the hardeners have a slightly different tint to them so the fast hardener is actually a little bit more yellow whereas the slow hardener is a little more clear so if you're mixing in a blue pigment and you use the fast hardener you're probably going to end up with a green tint which actually provides a really nice aquamarine these give you a lot of flexibility and so anytime you're doing something with a structural member and you need a glue particularly if it's gonna be outside these are the ones to use okay now let's talk about something a little bit different these are penetrating epoxies they are a little bit slower epoxy they are a very very watery in comparison and what these in tend to do is they tend tend to soak into the wood most epoxies are just going to sit on the surface or just get into the top few fibers these will actually get down into the wood and in some cases will get down about an eighth inch or more so they can stabilize the outside surface so if you ever have a punky wood that has some soft spark those parts on it and you want to keep this wood it looks cool but anytime you bump into you're gonna be digging it put a coat of penetrating epoxy on there and it will soak down into those fibers and stabilize them from the outside and so a lot of times if I'm working outdoors if I'm making an outdoor table I'm going to coat the entire table and penetrating epoxy and seal the outside that way water can't get down into it and then I can put a varnish or lacquer on top of that to give my finish a penetrating epoxy is a great way to stabilize punky wood or to seal wood so that absolutely no water can get in now with every poxy I've talked about so far there is an amount that you can pour it if you pour it any thicker than that then you're going to overheat the epoxy and you get a runaway process because most the epoxies will cure faster when they get hotter and the faster they cure the hotter they get because there's an exothermic reaction so they're gonna be getting hotter they're gonna kick your faster they're gonna get hotter and eventually you get a runaway where they boil up and they basically ruins the the epoxy for a structural purpose some most of those are glues they're intended for connecting two pieces together or sealing a surface they're not intended for pouring a thickness but if you ever want to do a River table or pour a void or you have a large gap you want to fill something larger than an eighth inch to a quarter inch you're gonna want a thicker setting epoxy the dining room table that I did a year or so ago I used this Eco proxy and this stuff is fantastic you can pour this three inches thick or more it is incredibly clear it is it pours like water it will work into any pour which means you have to tape things off perfectly with this the only downside is it takes three days for this to get hard and in some cases I'm not gonna even touch it for four days so you've got to make sure that you're gonna set something aside and leave it for a long time but this will give you a crystal clear it is the clearest epoxy you've ever come across and it pour it fills into any gap in any hole this is an incredible epoxy because you can just whip it up you don't have to vacuum it the bubbles just float right out because it's so thin for the desk I'm working on right now I'm actually using the total boat system and this is their thick set this is very very similar it's a little bit thicker than this but that means that it's going to cure faster this will cure in two days so you don't have to worry about it working on I can I can actually come back and use a plane on it in two days I can mix this up dump it in now I am gonna have a little more trouble of bubbles in this and that's why I'm actually vacuuming it vacuuming it out I can suck the bubbles out so when I pour it in it's crystal clear and this will give you an incredibly clear surface so if you're worried about time go with the total boat system because it does Paul really really clear both of these then mix with tinting very well you can actually mix in dyes intents to bring up a particular color so if you want to look into a clear surface and you want to see strata of different color you can mix colors into these and they're a lot of fun to play with next up we have our bar top epoxy or in this case they call it the tabletop this is another one from total boat and there's several other companies out there that make it now this is when you want that film finish on top of the wood if you've ever been to a bar and they have a wooden bar there's like an eighth inch of plastic sitting on top that's what these are you level out the top so it's perfectly level and you'll get an incredibly smooth clear surface that protects the wood and this is like the ultimate wood protection it is not going to allow you to touch the wood you're not going to spill anything on it if you dump water or other things onto the bar top it's not going to be a problem it's not going to stand it's not gonna reach the wood this is total protection so if you want that ultra high gloss stick build up on top this is what you want it's a little bit pricey but it does provide that really thick surface that some people really like now next I want to talk about cactus juice now this isn't an epoxy but it is still a resin but it's not a it doesn't need a hardener to harden up you don't need a second part it by itself this is activated by heat and one of the interesting things about that is you can use this it is very very watery it's very very thin and you can vacuum it into a piece of wood and this will allow you to then stabilize it with the other epoxies they're too thick to vacuum into the wood they don't work down into the pores this will get deep deep deep into the wood this will suck 3 & 4 inches down into the wood if you vacuum it down in and then the cool thing about that is you can stick it in the oven heat it up to over 200 degrees and it will then cure and harden up so you don't have to have a second part you just let this go in and you're good to go and there's any excess that drips off you pour it back in here and as long as it doesn't get up to 200 degrees you can store this almost indefinitely there are a bunch of other resins out there that will cure at different temperatures or different thicknesses some of them that cure in UV light and other things like that that I don't use that much but for stabilization particularly for turning this is used all time and I have an entire video going into stabilization so if you have a piece of wood that's punky or it's not quite as solid as you would like this is the answer to it because this will penetrate all the way into the center of the wood and harden it up lastly I want to talk about some of the extra things these are dyes and pigments it's always good to have a bunch of popsicle sticks on hand I use these from mixing up just grab some masking tape put it on the bench and then use the stick to mix it up and that's great for epoxies then we have our pigments and dyes so these ones are from eco poxy they work great with the well the eco poxy I was using earlier and they come in a wide variety of colors and you have to be very very careful with how much of this it just takes like one drop of dye into a quart or more of epoxy to change the color completely if you put it in two or three drops you may end up with something that's opaque you can't see into it but just one drop and you might be able to still sleep through it trans tint is great if you're trying to match the color of a stain or a wood grain this particular one is dark mission and I use this a lot if I'm filling voids and I want all those little cracks and crevices and bug holes this is a great look I like the color on this one drop will do a a lot and I've had this bottle for four or five years and I've barely even touched it I think I've only used like you know 20 or 30 drops out of the levels still like way up here the other ones I use are these powder mixes and I bought a set of them on eBay a while ago and they come with all these different colors and I like these because they kind of speckly if ever I want to add a little bit of color or texture to the surface these are what I'll mix in there and they come in every different color and silvers and golds and just the the clear white speckle I love mixing these and they can do some amazing things so usually when mixing these in I'm going to mix up the epoxy and I'm going to mix it thoroughly then I'm going to put my dye in and that gives me a chance to mix it again and make sure it is completely homogeneous this way I know that I'm not mixing just until the dialects good I'm mixing it completely because the most important thing with epoxy is to mix it all the way I know that I am just barely scratching the surface of epoxies and resins these are just the ones that I commonly use in the shop do you need all of these no if you have a structural glue epoxy that is all you really need the west's system or the total boat high-performance are going to run you about $100 for a set but it is something that is going to last you for years and years and years to come so a lot of people really kind of consider this an investment if you're gonna be doing anything with external use this is the way to go and then all the others are project specific do you have something that's punky then you need to dump in some penetrating epoxy do you have something you want to do a large thick pours then you're going to need a thick set epoxy and then of course colors anytime you want to do something fun there's lots of little ways to do into it so you really don't need all of this I just have most of it because well I have to teach it all I'm just hoping today I can take a little bit of the confusion out of the system so that we can answer a few questions now I'm sure there are lots more questions out there go ahead and throw those in the comments below I would love to hear those and I'll try and get to as many of them as I possibly can so I think that will about do it for today I hope you enjoyed this if you do have any other thoughts or ideas concerns snide remarks let me know down below thanks for watching and until next time have a wonderful day whatever you do use really good tape otherwise you're gonna get an epoxy floor yep this is what I would call a sticky situation

Channel: Wood By Wright How 2

Views: 38,649

Rating: 4.9522777 out of 5

Keywords: Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, epoxy, resin, what is the best epoxy, best epoxy, Woodworking Epoxy

Id: HsmKUwF7vrg

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020