Choosing Casting Resins

today I'm going to cover casting resins the different types and some characteristics about them welcome back to the shop this is a covert envy Woodworks and today I want to talk about casting resins uh when I got into casting a little over a year ago it took me a while to kind of figure out what exactly what are even my options what can I use and so when I got into it I first started with polyester resin and then I moved over to a luma light but since then I've tried a couple different things and I know a little bit more about what types of materials there are available that you can try and use for casting so when I talk about casting we're talking pen blanks usually that's what most people think of now I use it for bangle blanks for bracelets I make a metal metal core that I inlay with a some with acrylics and I also use it to be able to use different types of materials now you can make things like Bowl blanks out of it you can make rings out of this stuff you can make earrings and pendants and all kinds of things that you can maybe turn platters you could you could do all kinds of stuff so anyway I just want to get right to it so first thing on the list is polyester resin now this is again the first thing that I tried it's a fairly cheap it's a clear two-part resin similar to epoxy in use when you're once you've mixed it all up and everything you can color it you can put pearly kind of swirly stuff in it it'll pretty much adhere to anything you want to put in there the issues that I have with it is it is the smell is heavily Israeli toxic and like the first time I used it I were talking two to three minutes I'm getting dizzy and and it wouldn't leave the shop forever so they say to use a well-ventilated area like frankly you you want to use a respirator and you want it to be like whatever your ventilation is doing it better clear the room of this stuff or else I would suggest frankly I would I would use it outside so you don't have to worry about it but a pretty horrible smell but you know it turns fine some people say that this is a little bit brittle it's chippy I think that generally if you have sharp tools and you're running it it you know 3000 rpms you should be fine with this stuff the other thing is it's a slow setting type of resin so you're talking like an overnight deal now that's another drawback for me I don't like having to wait so there's other alternatives that are quicker they have their own drawbacks too but anyway that's something you can try you can get this stuff with like Michael's Hobby Lobby anywhere you know craft stores but it's kind of funny give it a try be careful with the fumes but it's pretty cool you can even cast this stuff in a PVC pipe and I mean you're already round at that point it makes things pretty simple so that's pretty cool uh you know something to try if you want again it's also kind of cheap next thing I'll list is epoxy resin this is less system it's a marine epoxy they use it for fiberglass setting and I think for like repairs and stuff in the boating industry I use it too as a slow setting glue wood glue dries you know sets up so quick that if I have a fairly complex glue I'll just pull epoxy out and not mess with the glue the wood glue now this stuff this is the resin can and then this is the hardener now this one specifically this number 206 I think they have 205 is a they call it fast setting hardener I'm going to make sure about that yep 205 is the fast setting hardener and it's still way slower than wood glue this is the slow setting hardener and then there's a 207 that's a crystal-clear hardener this stuff when it's cured it's going to be yellow so I mean like apple juice yellow so if you're trying to cast something and you need it to be like finish or see through it and be all nice don't use this go get the 207 now epoxy doesn't have any of those issues with smell and all that stuff generally I would kind of classify both of these types of resins I they turn as far as I'm concerned about the same it's the same type of material in the end you just don't have the smell when you're dealing you know when you're resting and the only other thing is I would say this stuff is way more expensive than than polyester resin and you're not going to walk into Home Depot and pick up West's system epoxy either so I get this stuff at Jamestown see the Jamestown distributors so I like it but I I don't I don't really use it I have tried it but I actually use something else called alumalite that I find to be a little easier now one of the things I was saying about this yellow partner with the epoxy for me I'm going to color most of the stuff that I do so I don't really care if it turns out yellow so if you have this give it a try and throw some trans tint in there and make a color out of it you won't even notice the yellow it doesn't it may affect the color but in the end a little bit you might have to adjust your how much you do or offset the yellow with something else but it'll work just fine with the yellow as long as you're not going for a dead clear casting so there's epoxy now the what the one that I use is alumalite it's a polyurethane resin I would say that it's a slightly softer material I you don't get as much of the chip out again I don't think that ship out the problem is he know what you're doing and have sharp tools however this stuff definitely you know I use it all the time and it doesn't chip out so the the other nice thing about alumalite is it comes in clear very similar at the in the end to these two except for a little bit softer but they also have something called white which when it's cured now this has some color in it but the white part that's what it looks like it's it's a totally opaque resin in the end so that's kind of cool because there's not too many of those types things out there and that's kind of the direction that I wanted to go with a lot of the stuff so that's another reason why I use alumalite I just I wanted though Paik stuff so alumalite is pretty cool however it's a little bit more I'd say it's probably about as expensive as the epoxy the other problem is you have to use a pressure pot with it now because of that problem there's also it's it's also a benefit this stuff cures the white stuff will cure fully in like 20 minutes I mean I can start using this stuff easily in about 20 maybe 30 minutes I'm talking turning it from from casting it in the pot pulling it out cutting it up and turning it it's it's that quick now that's nice but because it's set so quick you get bubbles trapped in there easily that's why you need to use a pressure pot with it so the clear has a little bit longer open time but even still even if it's cold outside you know right now it's hot so this stuff's actually curing really quick for me but even when it's cold you know winter this stuff the clear even I can turn it in probably 45 minutes maybe an hour at the most ready to go so it's pretty cool now those are the resins that I know of now there's there's one other category that I have no experience with but I do know you can cast with it it's a UV cure so basically it uses the sunlight or UV rays to cure itself resin now some of them are polyester resins and there's I think there's different categories of this stuff but I haven't used it but I think it's about the same as any of these other ones but I'm guessing it's a little bit more expensive now it cures by you can literally take it out in the Sun or you can put it under a UV one of those high-intensity UV lights so that's something else that if you want to look into you can do I don't really think it's necessary but it's another option out there so aside from that there's one other thing that I do know about and this really goes with the the opaque stuff the only other opaque thing that I actually know of is polymer clay now I have tried it and I've gotten terrible results this is a pen blank now it looks the same as the alumalite with the blue but this stuff is so soft that it just it's it's it's like rubber almost I think the problem is my baking you know so it's like clay you can roll it need it you know turn it into whatever you want you can stamp things into it it gives you actually sum it gives you some advantages and allows you to do things that none of these liquid resins will even come close to allowing you to do lots of options with it however I think the thing is you have got to have a fairly reliable oven that is at it it is at the you know you got to know what temperature I think this stuff is very susceptible to temperature issues and I'm using one of those little toaster oven things that the temperature fluctuates greatly and it's never on so or you know the dial is nowhere near what it actually is so if you want to use this stuff this this stuff it's like sculpey clay and you can get this stuff at like michaels and all that it's something you can try and see i just there's not a lot of information about how to get good results that i found and i just I haven't used it I think I might try it again sometime but just to let you know there is another option out there so as far as I know I think that's about it there's there's probably a couple other things that you could use but generally these are the ones that most people are using out there that I've that I've seen over the last year that I've been in this stuff so I really enjoy casting it's really given me quite a few more options in my woodworking and woodturning than I had before which is wood it opens up possibilities that literally you can't do and just just trying to use wood now a couple examples here this is a coffee bean Blanc I just literally bought a bag of coffee beans and dumped it in a casting mold and poured some of this white alumalite in it and you got a coffee bean Blanc people love it it smells like coffee even when you're turning it now if you don't like coffee I wouldn't recommend that but if you're making it for someone who does like coffee they're going to love you this is a blank app in blank that I made and it uses sagebrush I think I showed that earlier but you know one of the things that I really enjoy casting forward what why I really like it is it allows me to use a lot of the local materials that are around me and readily available and all that kind of stuff but in Nevada we're up by Tahoe now most of the trees around here are we're talking like pine that's it's pretty much it and I don't like using pine so I don't incorporate local materials in my work generally so because I don't really want to use pine now not that I want to use sagebrush but man I'll tell you what nobody else is putting sagebrush and pins mountain mahogany you know I can go out and just cut this stuff or find it on the ground and in even like things like this even this if this wasn't a weird wood if you're if you got broken gnarly kind of you know whatever this would be firewood maybe you know for most people if you cast it you get some amazing effects this is mountain mahogany cast in red so when I turn it back you're gonna have you're gonna have red here and then it's you know I'm going to turn into wood and it just gives you once you put it in the round form it allows you to just the what you get is amazing with some of this stuff and frankly these types of things where it's all cracked and gnarly those are the best things you can do another thing you can do is you can you know this is a sticker that I just basically stuck on a pen tube so you can use stickers you can you can put metal you know like I see the steampunk watch pins they put watch parts like gears and stuff and they bend them around the tube and then they just encapsulate it in a clear resin so basically the sky's the limit with this stuff that's it it allows you to do pretty much whatever the heck you want to do and it's really not that expensive the other thing is if you're in depending can you buy acrylic blanks man and you're going to continue doing that I would just make your own there are a few that would be fairly difficult to make on your own I think and yeah sometimes I buy blanks but not much you know I got the stuff why would I need to pay someone else to make a square thing out of plastic for me so I encourage you to get out there try something uh be careful with the polyester resin but there's you know you can try that it's readily available it's cheap so that's a good starter if you want to try other things if you want to go into the opaque stuff where solids you know you're probably gonna have to go with the luma light but I'll put links to where you can kind of get some of this stuff I mean you can get this at Hobby Lobby I'll put a link to Jamestown distributors I think you can get this stuff at wood craft now or Rockler one of them's carrying it and then alumalite you can get it at amazon.com or at alumalite comm also but I find Amazon's already got my credit card so I'll put links to that stuff in there now you're going to need to get a pressure pot if you run a limbo light so I'll probably do a video in the future covering this but you got to kind of watch what you're doing and be careful with the pressure pots but as far as I haven't had any issues and it's pretty safe so anyway if you have any questions about casting or anything else definitely they leave a question in the comments or you can email me at zack and NV Woodworks calm and yeah so if you enjoyed this video and you want to see some more casting and turning and general woodworking and kind of experimenting in the woodshop type stuff that's what I'm going to be producing in the future so definitely subscribe to my channel and yeah I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Zac Higgins

Views: 331,881

Rating: 4.8302326 out of 5

Keywords: Casting, types of resins, woodturning, pen blanks, sculpey, polymer clay, bowl blank, pressure pot, polyester resin, alumilite, epoxy

Id: pQ63Fky5ca4

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 16 2014