"Crystal Cave" Cracked blue resin, clear resin and cherry wood vase, turned on the lathe. O.U.R.

[Music] [Music] all right welcome back to the art for our youtube channel the inspiration for this project comes from um a place in mexico called the crystal caves i'm one of those national geographic or science channel junkies and i remember i remember when they um announced they had discovered this cave uh apparently it's connected to a mine so it's super deep um down in the crust of the earth and they were so surprised by this thing so so unusual you can see in that picture there's some crystals the size of cars you know small houses that's really hot in this mine and it's almost impossible to stay in there without these life support suits they've developed and even with those that you you can't stay there for very long people have been known to get quite sick and be ill almost die there because of the extreme temperatures and whatnot but uh just a beautiful place they discovered it always intrigues me when they find something like that you know what else is out there so anyway one of my favorite things in nature uh that i wanted to kind of duplicate so this has to be one of my more favorite projects anytime i get to take a hammer to something and be the crap out of it i'm in a good mood so i made these sheets of um of resin and the idea was to break them up but as you can see there they're super flexible even after they've cured for a number of days so what i did is i stuck them in the freezer for a couple of days and then they uh became brittle enough that i could break them up i wasn't sure exactly how this is going to turn out i uh as you can see me working this stuff was probably quarter inch to half inch thick in places thinner than others i was actually looking for shards of glass initially but realizing it was thicker i started to think it would have a different look and you know what turned out pretty cool so i'm quite happy with this one i stuck these containers down as backdrops because i was shooting the stuff all over the house need something catching it um the wood portion this project is a bit of cherry tree one of my patients donated a whole bunch of cherry tree logs which are one of my favorite uh they have some really lovely grain on it of course one of the challenges is uh a lot of times by the time i get one of these they're already cured and cracked which is fine it kind of makes it a little more authentic i suppose and because i'm dunking the whole thing in resin it doesn't really matter because the cracks are filled with resin and become super strong with that approach i've yet to have one fall apart and uh and be dangerous on the lathe which of course is something you have to be careful with you don't want to use really bad pieces of wood because it's quite dangerous so i wasn't sure how this thing was going to turn out exactly um i figured it looked like a geode um but as i got closer to the end i realized it looked more like that crystal cave i liked so much so i certainly sometimes realize what it looks like after i'm done with the project or as i'm completing it so it doesn't always work out the way i plan but in this case uh it was pretty close to my target one thing i tried a little different on this project was to follow the grain of the wood when i made my windows which is something i love doing [Music] i use this carving disc these last forever you can get a lot of project done there anytime you use a grinder to carve it's somewhat dangerous you need to know what you're doing i always wear long sleeve shirts and gloves mainly because the force that these pieces of wood come off of here is incredibly painful and even when i wear protective gear i still have bruises and tiny little cuts the biggest danger of course is kick back and so the key is to use the the front edge the bottom front edge of the grinder only if the top edge touches it it's going to jump back and get you so you have to be very careful with that these uh 40 grit 60 grit sanding discs are incredibly useful um they're powerful enough to carve with and they make short work of rough edges um whereas before i used to struggle with intake forever uh if you can get the angle grinder in there it's super useful uh starbond is one of my sponsors and i used this dark ca glue on purpose i wanted the crystals to have kind of a base that blended into the wood a little bit i actually liked how that ended up turning out kind of give it some more texture more and more interest what's really awesome about this glue is when you use this accelerant that you slip on there which is really just acetone there's a different type of it but this one's acetone the glue sets up in seconds so you have to be careful i've lost many a finger of a glove as i'm going along but because it sets up so quickly um i don't know how many pieces i glue on here but this only took like 30 minutes it went really fast in hindsight i wished i had used smaller pieces of the of the blue shards um just so that you could see between the two layers better it turned out really cool but i in hindsight i it would have been cool to have the top and the bottom look like they were floating all the way around kind of detach that would have been a cool look but uh i did end up with a whole bucket of this stuff that i didn't use so we'll be doing 2.0 at some point i'm sure we've been having some really awesome donations for art for our come in recently uh paintings and woodworking knitting um all kinds of good stuff we've had one of the better months since we started i think people do a little bit of their christmas shopping so come on over to that site the majority of the profit all of mine 100 of the profit but for some artists who are you know struggling to maintain uh 50 to 100 of the profit goes to operation underground railroad all right i turned over a new leaf on this project i decided i'm going to treat the wood beforehand see if i couldn't cut down on the bubbles and this is this resin's from illuminate i had left over one mistake i made was that the temperature in my garage is starting to drop i'm in northern utah and it never gets below 55 50 in my garage but we're getting down there and so resin is really thick or at least this version is very thick and and so ended up really foamy because of the because when you stir it it's just so thick it was like honey so i was a little worried about that sealing the wood appropriately i don't think it soaked in as well as it could have because of how thick it was but um i wasn't shy about using a ton of it because i was determined to see if i could stop bubbles once and for all the process didn't really work i still had a lot of bubbles stream through and i'm not sure why uh the more i think about this the more i think that for you to successfully seal the wood you've got to completely seal every single crack and it's got to be airtight which probably is going to take multiple layers layers of resin which takes days and days which i don't always have so i'm going to try something else next time where i put it in my uh vacuum chamber and see if i can't get the resin to sink deeper into the wood when i do it i've also had a lot of people recommend cactus juice for the same purpose um so i've got a few things to experiment with going in the future one thing's for sure using the pressure or the vacuum chamber really helps to get rid of the micro bubbles that show up in resin when you're when you're mixing it so i love using this total boat it's the fathom thick set resin they're one of my sponsors and i'm very grateful for that because resin is not cheap but they've made it possible for me to do a lot of these projects that are bigger they use a lot of resin then you can get a discount on their product products both with starbonn and totalboat if uh if you use the code you'll find below in the description so with the vacuum chamber the way i've been doing it is there's a lever here that control the level of pressure and so i let it foam up just as it reaches the top i drop the pressure again the idea is we're just trying to get rid of all the bubbles and so they pop and they pop and i haven't counted here but it usually takes 30 40 minutes repeating this cycle many times until you get to the very end and it stops making bubbles because there's no more no more air in the resin kind of takes a long time you see me sitting around my cell phone but that's that's the idea so that part of it i've really liked the micro bubbles story is no longer an issue unless there's a lot of moisture in the wood and it reacts with that or something else but this part i've liked i think next time i'm going to try to put my whole project right in the vacuum chamber see if i can't work the air out of the wood and every time you drop the pressure hopefully the resin work its way deeper and deeper into the wood and so we'll see a few things i want to try i've really liked this casting technique using a container full of sand and then plastic foam plastic sheeting around the outside the reason i like doing this is it helps soak the entire project so cracks all the cracks are filled but also i never seem to make the same project twice so i never i could make a silicone mold i suppose but it would only be for one project so hardly worth it this way i can make a new mold every time that's custom what i'm working on is the folds you'll notice the odder the shape the more the folds in the sheeting you have and so you lose some resin in there probably would be a good idea to hot glue those or something but i'm getting better and better at limiting the loss of resin and and that's awesome so slowly perfecting my techniques here i'm always on a pretty tight schedule and sometimes when i have free time i gotta work and i wanna work on a project i just gotta go for it and i knew this resin had set up nicely where i cared but for some reason on the bottom the fatter in there it was still jelly so you know i don't do it justice on the video but when i started getting into it chunks of this stuff was just flying around the office at the office my my uh shop i mean like somebody was shooting jelly across the room but that was kind of a new experience in tourney the money from the videos on youtube and the sell of my projects as well as the other artists who donate to art for our all goes to operation underground railroad um operation underground railroad they go around the world helping to fight child sex trafficking it's a horrible subject but it's a massive massive problem around the world and lots of victims out there so we're doing our best to fight back so these guys go around identify kids that are in trouble free them do sting operations work with local government agencies whatever it takes here's the jail shooting all over the place get them into adoption agencies or return to their families if they've been separated one of the hardest things i'm learning is that often families are involved and so it's the after care is something that our is really focused on trying to perfect and get kids into a much better situation where they won't be sucked back into this evil world of trafficking so you can imagine the whole process is very expensive very time consuming and that's where we donate our money that we earn from this project so we're about to hit 30 grand which is absolutely amazing could not do it without your help ways you can help simply watch videos share them um buy the projects i've got one or two left oh they almost sell out every time but i've got i think i've got one left the piracantha vase i think the only one i've got besides this one but there's about 70 other artists who have donated stuff we got a lot of things left over that are high quality cool things you can be a paid member of this channel um a couple bucks a month all of it goes to our you can direct directly donate to the fundraiser which there's a link in the in the um description there's also a fundraising link for the youtube youtube channel itself so anyway spread the word help us raise more money it all goes for an amazing cause we're about to hit thanksgiving here united states so if you celebrate that have a happy thanksgiving otherwise i'll see you on the next project and thank you so much for your support guys foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Art Giving Hope: Woodwork, Resin, Photography

Views: 507,036

Keywords: wood turning, crafts, ourrescue.org, lathe work, bowls, wood bowls, resin bowls, acrylic on canvas, acrylic painting, paint, homemade projects, Tim Ballard, OUR, O.U.R, O.U.R. Rescue, trapeze painting, turning resin, acrylic pouring, dan preece, operation underground railroad, OURRESCUE.ORG, wood carving, Dan Preece foot surgeon, paint can painting, stop child sex trafficking, podiatry, foot and ankle, surgery, foot pain, artforour.org, kim tippin, Nick Zammeti, pohl barn

Id: q94DL-BJmQ8

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021