Calculating Epoxy Volume--How to Epoxy Woodworking

hey this is game with black Dale studio and this week I'm going to be showing you how to calculate how much epoxy you need for your resin table project and I'm going to show you on this 120 inch by 48 inch black walnut resin table that I'm building because this one is such a weird shape that if you can calculate this one you can calculate any table the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna take measurements about every six to eight inches it doesn't have to be exact you just want to make sure you remember exactly how many measurements you take and that's gonna be the critical part so you can see here I'm just going about every six to eight inches taking a measurement in inches and then writing it down on the slab itself these slabs actually had some really tapered spots and so you can see what I'm doing is I'm taking the distance to the top and then the distance at the bottom and normally I wouldn't do this but since there's about a six inch difference between the slope there that's why I was important to take a distance on the top and the bottom the more measurements you take the more accurate it's gonna be and you can see since this is kind of a weird roundabout turn there I'm just kind of guesstimating the distance between each one of those you'd be surprised how accurate this is in the end and all we're doing here is they're really a pretty basic volume calculation so you can take all of your measurements add every single one of them up making sure you didn't miss any you put them in of the calculator here so kind of a little hyperlapse of me adding everything up and that's our total number took a screenshot to make sure it wouldn't forget that I got to count the total number of measurements I took which was thirty-five four twelve divided by thirty five eleven point seven seven so we're gonna remember that number and the reason we're gonna remember that number is because that is the average width of our entire River so we need to find now the average depth and the average length and since this is pretty unusual shaped River it we're going to go around the turns there if you had a rather straight one wouldn't be so hard this one we're gonna have to go around the turns a little bit and again it just estimating the best I can you may laugh but this is really similar to how I took notes in college didn't do it on a piece of wood but not far off anyway now we're gonna keep adding this up to find the length of our River and added it all up take a screenshot so we don't forget it but the total length is 195 inches so we're gonna add that to our average width and I should make a note that I actually took that point seven seven off because there's a piece I'm gonna be adding in your se in a minute so I did it 195 by eleven by two point seven five and I didn't intentionally leave that point seven seven off for a smaller piece you'll see here in a little bit anyway that gives us 96 liters but we need to add an eighth of an inch underneath the wood which you may think is a waste and you would definitely be right because this epoxy is gonna seep under there it's really flat maybe a sixteenth of an inch but on a table like this it's gonna be thirteen wasted liters a whole eighth of an inch and we'd even add an eighth of an inch around the entire perimeter so you may hate seeing all this epoxy wasted and I do too but this is really just how it works so another two liters wasted around the perimeter so we're gonna add all those numbers up we have the 96 plus 13 plus 2 it takes me longer than it should to add it up double-checking 111 seems right anyway should be a hundred eleven litres according to this calculation here is the piece that is the reason it took off that point seven seven from the average with just a small piece added in there there was my best guesstimate for how much volume it would take off and you can see here the slab has been shellac so the chalk wipes off really easy I do recommend shellacking your tables and there's a lot more information I can give on these resin table builds in my other videos that I recommend clicking over if you are wanting to see a full tutorial on how to build those resin tables but this one I'm just mixing my dress I'm actually counting them so I can do this in multiple pours and get the same color black but it ended up being 15 liters per bucket so it's gonna be pretty easy to keep count of how many buckets and how much volume we end up using and these buckets really don't go quite as far as you think in a big table like this these pores are always pretty fun to watch though I'm really trying not to splashed in there like you see some people do its best to get the fewest of bubbles possible if you just pour it nice and easy another bucket down no real reason it couldn't be pouring all in one spot but I do kind of like to mix it up a little bit it's important to get the table as flat as you can notice at least when you're topping it off it's gonna make the biggest difference for you to make sure not all the epoxy cools to one end and anyway I let this first layer cure because it was so much epoxy it can react if you pour too much lunch so I did 45 liters and I'm gonna do my second pour to top it off I did wait till this was fully cured which ideally you want to wait about two days till it's just kind of gummy and then do the second pour but since it was fully cured you need to come back scuff it up to get a really good bond on that next pour also it is black and you're not gonna probably see any dust that's in there but I still want to get it as clean as I absolutely can the microfiber does a really good job at picking up all that dust this damn is kind of optional and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but it gives you about another quarter inch 3/8 of an inch of a buffer when you top this off if your tables slightly tilted and over ten feet this table there's no way I was gonna get a perfectly level so there's gonna be a little bit of a pool at one end and not so much the other I did also count the drops per liter of black on this epoxy to make sure you wouldn't see a thin layer of color change cuz you know even black you think is just black but if you had a very black on the top and not as black on the bottom you would get a little bit of a seam there that you just wouldn't want the little see from the side so I've got a that was perfect at the color matches I could pour my buckets here seeing how close we're gonna get I did see one guy online that was bragging about a sixty liter pour and this is my biggest part of a tan it's only a hundred liters there are some guys online that I've seen doing and I've seen 200 liters and I think Black Forest even did a 300-acre pour which is just crazy but a good tip if you're not using a vacuum chamber is to let these bubbles set for about 15 minutes let them all rise come back with a torch pop them all and that's gonna get rid of a big chunk of them it's not as important with a black table but with a transparent table it's really really important minimize those bubbles and some of you are probably gonna notice that even though I popped all those bubbles as soon as I pour it and I'm introducing out a lot more air so more bubbles are coming and most of those will pop on there and you just want to minimize all the bubbles you possibly can one tool that I love for these projects is a little jello injector you can get a whole pack of money Amazon for super cheap but they make a great tool for going back filling the little nooks and crannies and I have a lot more details on this if you do want a full resin table build I'll include some links to that but one of my favorite tips that I found out kind of by accident and this is one I figured out on my own even is using a brush to brush all your sides in and that's because these bubbles when they splash in they like to cling to the sides like you see you know bubbles stuck to a straw in your soda or in your water that if you can brush it off it's really really going to minimize the amount of bubbles to end up sticking to the sides in the end so as I'm doing the voiceover I realized I already kind of gave away the total number but how close did I estimate added up all the buckets it ended up being a hundred and five liters total which actually surprised me even a little bit I didn't know I was gonna be that accurate it was 111 was our estimate but 105 was really really close we could easily poured another six liters in there if we wanted to really top it off but here's a quick clip of us at creative woodworking getting it surfaced here's a clip of it ready to ship I'm gonna do a video on building a crate like this if you're interested and here's a shot of it in its forever home and actually getting my wife credit for this joke she called it his forever home because it's gonna be too heavy to ever move out of there okay that's the whole video I really appreciate you making it this far if I left anything out if I wasn't clear on anything please feel free to ask me in the comments I'm really pretty good about answering every single one of those and as always if you liked this video please subscribe for more just like it thanks again

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 4,759,487

Rating: 4.8777933 out of 5

Keywords: resin table, epoxy volume, how much epoxy do i need, epoxy volume calculation, how to make epoxy table, how to woodworking, resin volume calculation, diy epoxy table, diy resin, blacktail studio, epoxy conference table

Id: vbv9RyUHyFg

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019