DIY – How to Apply Clear Epoxy Resin – “Liquid Glass”

want to get that ultra and glossy professional looking finish and your wood projects will show you how after this [Music] I'm Kyle from adventures at home and in this video we're going to show you how to use two-part epoxy to get that ultra clear ultra gloss finish and your projects so for this project we have a coffee table with some 1-inch thick oak top on it and it's been pre stained and prefinished pre sanded all of that so it's ready to go for its final coat and because it is a coffee table we want that ultra durable finish so we're going to use the ultra thick two-part epoxy finish and the stuff is kind of contrary to what you read online it's kind of a pain to work with but the results are worth it especially if it's going to be for like a tabletop or a countertop or something like that this stuff is ultra durable it's way more UV resistant than polyurethane and it holds up a lot better if someone doesn't use a coaster on it or what what have you and if the finish gets nicked or something it's a lot easier to just sand it down a little bit and put another layer of this on to refinish it so even if you do have to refinish it it'll last a lot longer and be a lot less work to keep the finish looking great so you'll see here we have two parts this stuff comes this is the gallon size it's that's another setback it's quite pricey the gallon of this stuff is probably around $70 so it comes with the clear resin and then a hardener so you're going to mix these in a 50/50 mix by volume so we're not going to show you right now how we're going to do that I have for the first step in this video I've got a pre-mixed set and one of the tips for this is because this is a large table and the oak is quite porous we're actually going to put a thin coat on before we do the final flood coat and that makes a huge difference getting all the air bubbles out of it and we do have a couple of spots where there's a couple of dents in the wood and we're going to fill those with this thin coat first and then when we do the flood coat it'll be much easier to get that perfect finish that you want so when we do the flood coat I'll actually show you we actually do make this by weight it says to do it 50/50 by volume we just do a quick calculation to get it by weight and we'd put it use it on a kitchen scale and then we can get it exact without having to waste another one of these containers measuring them out 5050 so the first step is going to be to get your surface dust-free you want all dust debris everything off of your surface so we've already wiped this down with a spray cleaner and we've let this sit for about 24 hours and make sure all the moisture is off of it next step right before you finish it is just going to be to take a tack cloth if you don't know what a tack cloth is it looks like cheesecloth but it's just kind of tack to it and it's just going to remove any dust and particles from the surface so just give this whole your whole surface a good wipe down alright now when you're ready to apply your thin coat this is going to be a lot different than the flood coat that you're gonna apply so when you do the thin coat first just identify any problem areas that you think you might have so right here we just have a little nick where some of the grain ripped out and there might be I was looking over this earlier and I think this wasn't the only major problem that we're gonna have to do this on but just take some of your resin give it a quick stir again now you do have a pretty good working time with this stuff you have about 30 minutes before it sets so there's no need to rush but at the same time when you're done don't go back and keep trying to fix stuff this stuff will kind of set and fix itself as you go so and working with it too much will cause the final product to not look as well so all you're going to do is identify your problem spot you're just going to take a little epoxy and just pour it right into that and it can be too much too little just as long as it starts to fill if it is too little you'll just catch that again and if it is too much you're gonna wipe it when you pour the thin coat on anyway so just pour it and that's gonna start filling that crack so when you go to wipe your final thin coat on it doesn't suck it all in and you're still left with an indent so to apply this all you're going to do is just pour this in a pattern all across the wood as you can tell this isn't a whole lot of epoxy for this there's going to be way more and we do the flood coat we are just gonna spread this on really thin for right now so make sure you get all of it out of that container this stuff is pricey so use it all you can set that aside can't use this again so now to spread out the thin coat I just prefer to use one of these foam brushes all you're going to do is spread it and just get everything covered nice and thin [Applause] so here's the other Knick that I thought I found that I didn't see so I'm just gonna go ahead and dab some extra epoxy in there then when I'm all done spreading this I'll just come back and make sure that these two cracks filled in so then the last thing that you're gonna do for when you do the actual flood coat the torch is gonna come in real handy that's how you get the bubbles to raise to the surface but for this because it's so thin in theory all the bubbles should be able to raise out and pop themselves but where you did apply in these Nick's right here the epoxy is going to be too thick so you just want to hit them with a little bit of gentle heat and just see if any bubbles start rising if you don't get any bubbles stop right away and just discontinue it's not necessary you were able to work all those out yourself if you do you can just gently heat it and then I'll move to the other one and then come back just to get some of the bubbles out but we'll see if it's necessary [Applause] [Applause] so we weren't getting any bubbles so that's good so that means we got all the air bubbles out of these and with a thin coat you're not gonna have to do anything else you're gonna leave it sit but one of the keys is you want this to be dust free so right now we're planning on going outside and doing some stuff for a couple hours so no one's gonna be in the house we shouldn't have any dust moving around so we're gonna let this sit for a little for a few hours while it just hardens up a little bit and then we're actually gonna move it into another room and we're gonna leave the door closed in there and no one goes in there for about 24 hours just so we don't get any dust movement in that room we don't have the furnace on in there or the air conditioning or any of the air vents so none of the inn I mean it seems like a lot just to get a clear coat on this but not having any dust movement around this is going to make a huge difference in the final product so we'll see in about 48 hours when we do the flood coat alright now that our thin coat has had about 72 hours to harden we're ready to get started with our flood coat so because we did let the thin coat fully harden we're gonna have to rough it up just a little bit with some 320 grit sandpaper just so that the flood coat adheres better to the thin coat underneath alright now we'll just take some acetone and wipe it down to clean it off all right now that this tabletop is ready we can get our mix ready to go and this time I promise you guys we're gonna show you how we do our mix by weight now we calculate that out so we can get it exact rather than trying to pour it and do it by volume which is a little more difficult to get perfectly accurate so what we got here so our table dimensions are 24 by 44 inches so that'll give us a thousand fifty six inches squared which is seven point three four feet squared now if your resin however much it'll do ours will do 32 square feet per gallon and we have a gallon or resin so we can figure out that we need point two three gallons convert that to ounces we need approximately 30 ounces of resin for the manufacturers recommendation for how much it will cover and we're gonna add about five percent to that just for good measure so we don't run out during our pour so we're gonna end up wanting 32 ounces of each our 32 ounces total or 16 ounces of resin and 16 ounces of partner so now we know the density of the resin is 2.25 grams per milliliter and the density of the hardener is 0.94 grams per milliliter and we can go ahead and convert that so we know that we're gonna need a thousand 65 grams of resin and 445 grams of hardener so we can just take our kitchen scale we can set that down we're gonna take our cup you're going to need two of these so make sure you have more than one on hand go ahead and set that on the scale and zero it out all right now we're going to take our resin all right we've got the desired amount there and now we can go ahead and measure out our hardener next all right looks good now we'll fast forward this next part for ya but it is recommended with the stuff that we're using that you stir it for six full minutes in the first container you transfer it to the second container and stir it for another six minutes so we'll see you in 12 minutes all right our 12 minutes of mixing are up so we're almost ready to pour just one or two more things to do before we can get to pour in the Sun we're going to take a tack cloth and just give everything one final wipe to get all of the dust off you want to be super dust conscious when you're doing this it kind of seems over-the-top all these different measures but the final product is gonna be worth it and if you don't the dust is really going to show through or any dirt that you do have in here is really going to stand out in the final product and it's also a good idea we're going to be using the scraper to spread it out give that a wipe down to get all the dust off that and I go so far as to just give my hands a quick wipe and when we did bring this table out we leveled everything on Shem so everything should be perfectly level we're just gonna go ahead and double-check everything to make sure it looks good everything still is looking great and one thing that we didn't show you is underneath our frame we laid down freezer paper gloss side up and we find that that's the best for catching all the drips and it's the most cost-effective way to do it instead of laying down like painters painters tarp or something like that I'm just regular old the big rolls of freezer paper that you can buy at Walmart or any big-box store pretty much just lay about two sheets thick with the glossy side up and that should catch all your drips this is going to drip a lot so as we start doing this don't worry about it it's meant to self level so it is going to flow off the edges now we can give this one good final stir and we can start pouring the Sun and go ahead and make sure that you get everything out of that container even if it just all drips off the edge it's better that you get it out with how expensive this stuff is and it's going to start to harden right away in the container after you pour it out so it's not like you can go back and get a couple extra drops if you need it after you're done working set this aside all right now we can take our scraper and just start spreading this stuff out there's no real science to it just try and get a somewhat even coat on everything and try not to push it off the edges yet kind of work it towards the edge and then back towards the center and so on until you get an even coat so now as you're starting to get everything with a nice coat leveled out now you can start working towards the edges just let any excess just push down and let it drip off to the side don't worry about the drips for right now you're going to go back and touch those up once you get the top all straightened out if you do notice you did get a piece of something in there while you're working just dig it out and smooth it back over so if you do have any drips down the side it will kind of even itself out as it cures but it is much better if you can smooth some of those out just so you don't have run into any problems down the road with any of those just take your time you get about half an hour of working time with this before it starts to get kind of tacky Anya all right once you have everything worked out pretty well don't overwork it you can kind of drive yourself nuts trying to clean everything up let the great self-leveling that this product is made for do its job and once you have it pretty close let the product do it itself while it works for a while it cures so the last step is we're just going to take a torch and we have a few bubbles in here and you're just going to lightly heat this and the heat will cause the bubbles to raise to the surface and pop it's going to leave a little indentation but don't be worried the self-leveling is just going to take care of that as this cures so and don't get it too hot because you can overheat this and you can burn it so just be real gentle and just slowly let the bubbles pop on their own you guys can see all it takes is a real light tap of the heat just to get near to the bubble and they pop right away so just kind of flick of the wrist towards the bubbles and they come right to the surface and pop and then they level themselves right back out [Applause] so if you notice I keep moving around I don't I still got a few more bubbles over here but now I'll move down here to do it so I don't heat up one spot too much at a time [Applause] it's kind of like playing whack-a-mole except pop the bubble [Applause] it's really nice if you've got a light right above you as you're working you can the surface it'll shine like glass once you have all the bubbles out and if you don't have them all out yet you can definitely see them with the direct light on it [Applause] all right so don't overwork it just like I said before so because we did do that thin coat you're not going to get any bubbles rising up from the surface of the wood yet so as long as you pop a lot of the main bubbles any of the tiny little trapped ones are going to work themselves out as this cures so don't overdo it you can definitely hurt yourself if you try and work with this stuff until it's past the point where it's starting to cure and then you can really mess up the self leveling feature of this so it's time to let this sit for a little while we're gonna leave it right here where it's nice and level for about 24 hours and then we're gonna move it into another room where it's not going to be disturbed with a dehumidifier to finish curing this does have to stay above 75 degrees the whole time it cures so make sure you don't have that AC cranked or anything in the house and definitely don't do this outside and winter and we did the do this in the basement so we're gonna go upstairs and be done down here for the night and we're gonna try and have very little to no air movement down here while this cures so we don't get any dust kicked out all right I'll see you when it's cured and we can take a look at the final product all right guys we're back after 72 hours of letting this cure and man does it pop this turned out awesome so a little bit of hard work and you can get that ultimate finish that you want on your projects and this is going to be super durable and more UV resistant than just doing a polyurethane coat so hopefully some of our tips and tricks will help you when you want to do this finish in your projects it does seem a little bit tedious but the end result is worth it especially when you're doing a tabletop like this one so if you liked our content make sure you hit the thumbs up button and if you want to keep seeing more like this hit the subscribe button we really appreciate all your support and until next video I'm Kyle helping you create your own adventure at home [Music]

Channel: Adventures At Home, LLC

Views: 858,045

Keywords: Liquid glass, clear coat, resin, famowood, famowood epoxy resin, table top coating, bar top resin, bar top epoxy resin, bar top ideas, bar top finishes, table top, table top diy, diy, how to, tutorial, for wood, coating wood, table, table diy, use, wood, home depot, Jason Hunt, Bar Top Epoxy, Easy Composites LTD, putty, thinking putty, slime

Id: 9fpCDcNuQ5k

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018