DIY Epoxy Table - How To Resin and Wood Table - How To Woodworking

hey this is game with blacktails to do and this we're clearly taking you through how to make an epoxy and wood table and you may have seen some of my other videos where I've taken me through this process before and every one of these tables I learned a little bit more than I did on the table before so I kind of feel like the people who watch my first video might be a little bit shorted compared to the ones that watched my last video and this week will be really focusing on the epoxy I'm using an all new epoxy at least an all new epoxy to me and I'm gonna tell you at the end what I thought of it and if it might be the best epoxy I've used yet stay tuned anyway back to the build as you can see there started off a little bit rough knocking it over here to see what my neighbors see all the time this is me knocking stuff over and seeing if anybody saw but I'm going through usual steps that I've taken on my past tables medicine just removing all the soft wood I'm gonna get every bit of soft wood out of there and then I'm also gonna get all the bark and really the strands the things that kind of cling on to the side I'm gonna take everything off with this chisels to get the bulk of it then I would switch over to a wire wheel on my angle grinder and this works really well it does leave a few marks so I'm gonna be doing black epoxy as you start to start there so you won't see those marks but if you're doing a clear epoxy I might go a little less aggressive than this wire wheel on the angle grinder a lot of people have asked if you could leave the bark on for one of these epoxy tables and if you want a firm answer I'd say no not to say that there's not somebody out there that could have done I've heard some bad stories of people trying it I have never personally tried it doesn't seem like a very good idea to get a good solid bond so I'd say no but you're welcome to prove me wrong this template is one of my favorite tools for making one of these epoxy tables cuz it really helps you visualize if you were really good with fusion 360 you may be able to get away with not using this template but for me I'm kind of simple and it works really well from me and if you paid close attention you noticed I made two marks I made a inside mark and an outside mark and the inside mark is gonna be the finished size of my table and the outside mark was about a one-inch buffer on all sides so I put the track kind of in the middle of that because I wanted to have at least a one-inch buffer on the length and the width to make sure that when I cut it down to my final size I got it to the exact size my client is expecting I always give my clients the option of either me designing the table or they can kind of Co design it with me and pretty much a hundred percent of them take me up on the opportunity to design it with me and I think it's great because one I think two minds is better than one and two they get exactly what they're expecting there's no surprises in the end you can actually see you right there on the right I broke a piece off and brought it down at my clients request which I would have never done on my own but in the end it actually really improved the design of the table this here is not the new epoxy I was talking about at the start of the video this is a West system epoxy it's a really good epoxy it's really hard it's just not a deep Pore epoxy and what I'm doing here is I'm sealing all the edges and it's gonna do a couple things one it's gonna really prevent any bubbles from clinging to the sides and two it's gonna prevent any staining and it's kind of the same thing that the shellac does is we're just providing a barrier between the black epoxy we're gonna pour and the wood itself because that black epoxy will essentially just stain soap into the wood and stain anything so the shellac is gonna provide that barrier on the top and the epoxy on the sides but we have to go back and scuff it up like I'm doing here because epoxy doesn't like to stick to anything slick and that's why we're just basically roughing it up so we get a good bond when we pour that main portion of our epoxy if you want some more info on how I build my molds for these epoxy tables I'll add a link to a video from a previous build in the video description we're going to a little bit more in depth but what i'm doing here is i'm adding mold release and that's where i covered up my pieces with that drop cloth to make sure none of that mold really settled on the wood because I would definitely compromise the bond between the wood and the epoxy if anything that mold really settled on it and this is something I haven't done and most of my previous builds as you saw I added a little bit of an air gap and that's gonna provide air flow which is gonna keep the epoxy cooler which means I can pour more epoxy and that's one of the big problems when making these tables is the epoxy overheating when you pour you know over that inch and three-quarters two inches and it's gonna be about two and a quarter inches so I wanted to make sure I definitely keep it cool enough for this kind of new experimental epoxy that I'm using in speaking of that epoxy of the epoxy I'm gonna be using for this build is the liquid glass epoxy by fiberglass coatings and these guys have been around a long time I just haven't used it before they claim this epoxy can go 2 to 6 inches privately I'm highly skeptical of that but we are gonna at least test it out at this two and a quarter inch pour that we're gonna do here I actually did an entire video and blog post just on calculating epoxy so I'll include links to both those in the video description below back to the epoxy we are using the liquid glass epoxy by fiber glass codings and again this is the two inch poor privately they said two to six inches which is pretty cool if it's possible I'm not so sure it is but they say that they've been six inch pores in their lab one complaint I have is pretty small containers for these types of big pores because I don't like having this much trash and I ended up using quite a bit of these jugs so I will plead to them to start making bigger containers if they're gonna be kind of players in this epoxy table market cuz nobody likes to have this much trash the dye I'm using is gonna be this black trans tint you can see it works really well because you can't even read the label anymore but what I am doing is I like to count my drops and black it's not as important but if you have to go back and touch it up it's nice to know the ratio of black to epoxy used so that way you can get the same tones you will see kind of seams between pores if you have to touch up a small area one tip I'd really give the people try on the first table is I can't emphasize how much you need to mix this epoxy and it's not just length of time but really scraping the sides scraping the bottom making sure you have every bit of it mixed way way more than you think definitely overkill on the mixing another good tip is just letting your buckets set for about 15 or 20 minutes and this will let a lot of those bubbles rise you can kind of come back pop them with the torch and that will eliminate quite a few of your bubbles in your finished product this is your first time to my page welcome I really appreciate you watching and one thing you should know is that I am really good about answering almost every single one of the comments you leave down below so if I'm not clear but I think if I rush anything or if you're just not sure please feel free to ask me in the comments below also I really appreciate it if you do like what you see to go ahead and hit that subscribe button up in the corner it really helps me to keep making more content like this and for those of you that have been to my page before you're probably wondering how I got these amazing Michael Bay esque aerial views when I'm normally on a static tripod and that is because my wife wasn't at work for once and I was able to get her to come slum it out in the garage with me and get some awesome shots which actually worked out pretty well because she has an awesome steady hand although I did give her one job and that was to keep her car out of the shot so it didn't look like Blacktail garage it looked like Blacktail studios so she dropped the ball there but overall she does a pretty some job if you're wondering if I could tell the difference between the new epoxy and the old epoxies have used yet really no I can't tell any difference they're about the same viscosity which really fluctuates with the temperature of your shop so no big changes yet it's pouring really nice I like my usual trans tint dies gave it a really nice black I'm using my usual jello injectors to kind of fill in all these little pits and low spots so overall no impressions one way or the other on the epoxy so far one thing I didn't really talk about at the start but you need to make sure you have good kiln dried wood and the kiln dried is really to make sure that you don't have any bugs that are come crawling out of a finished project because even if you encapsulate the whole thing in epoxy if there's live bugs inside they will come crawling out and you can see here these are some little bug holes and I buy all my wood up it go we walnut so I know everything is kiln dried and gonna be treated for it so I'm just filling all these little bug holes with more epoxy which actually gives a really cool look in the end at least in my opinion but this would be a real red flag if you had just air dried your wood so make sure you get good kiln dried wood if you're gonna do one of these types of tables there's one tip I can give you this gonna save you a ton of time later and that is to brush your sides if your epoxy this is really gonna prevent the bubbles from clinging to the sides if you watched one of my first epoxy videos you noticed how much time I spent filling in these tiny little pits which are the micro bubbles right near the edges if you brush your sides that will really save you a ton time later by preventing those micro bubbles from clinging as I mentioned before this is about two and a quarter inches maybe just over even in a few spots and after about 14 hours you see it's up to about 95 degrees which is a good temperature you want to be warm but you don't want it to get over that say 120 degrees and I'm loosening these clamps because when the epoxy cures it shrinks a little so you don't want to prevent the wood from moving with it which could actually crack your table so just kind of Snug them down and you can see they're at 20 hours it's getting really thick everything is curing really nicely so I'm really liking what I see out of this epoxy so far this liquid glass has the same cure time as the other main manufacturers about 72 hours although I found that's not always too consistent but in this case at 72 hours it was rock hard and ready to come out of the mold and you may remember a used mold release and that's actually not what sticking it's that caulk I used around the edges of the mold that caused all the stick in which is why any of these wood wedges which kind of a pain you can see there once I break it free there's absolutely nothing on the underside of the table mass where the mold release comes in because if I hadn't use mold release that entire piece of melamine would have been bonded to that epoxy there for those of you that have seen my videos before you've seen me go up to creative woodworking in Portland before and it's just a big industrial shop you might want to actually do some research your town might have someone with a big planner that'll run out time they charge $75 for a half hour and I can get this done in about eight minutes so it's definitely worth it much better than using a router or something like that if you don't have exit to a big shop I actually have a blog where have a few different methods of how to flatten tables like this in your garage using something pretty simple so I'm fortunate enough to have a big shop that'll square it up on their sliding saw flatten it on their big planer if you're not it doesn't mean you can't build a table it just means that I'm a little bit luckier than you I would like to hear from you guys in the comments that this still counts as say a DIY table if I'm able to go to a big shop like this have them do a lot of the heavy lifting so let me know in the comments what you think if this still counts making the table myself or if it's kind of cheating a few months back I went ahead and started a blog and before I did I wasn't really sure if there's gonna be a need for it if people are actually gonna use it and now that I have it I'm really glad that I do because I think I've really deep into some things that are kind of boring to some people but are really useful to others we're like things like these sanding things like the finishing process where as I can get really in-depth and not have to worry about making a really exciting youtube video that it's gonna get generate a lot of clicks so I'll include links to both those I have a sanding one of a finishing one an addition to a lot more and it'll really help you can kind of keep it as a bookmark or a reference if you have questions during your sanding and finishing process one of the most useful products I found in the last few months is this black CA glue the black star bond and it works really really well especially since I do so many black tables these tiny little micro bubbles you saw that it brushed it in before but I didn't get all of them and this one I use a really fine cheap paintbrush from Amazon and I just go back and I just brush in all these little spots and I spent quite a bit of time doing this still even though I have my trick that's supposed to keep you from having to do this is going back and hitting it with the little paintbrush and the CA glue will save you a ton of time it leaves almost perfect results after I got done rounding over the corners with this eighth inch router bit I was gonna do a few more touch-ups and then I was gonna be ready for the Osmo 1101 thin and that's what you see here is just a really thin finish that soaks in - supposed to help a lot more with the water prevention this is a relatively new product to me but look what I found I found it's not really a soft spot really just a porous spot and if you sum that last table build I ran into a similar problem it was a little different than this but I swore that I wasn't gonna do it on this table and sure enough I found a problem spot so I had to sand down come up with a solution to kind of harden up that area in the solution I came up with was gonna be adding this really thin CA glue and it's similar to that black CA glue I was using earlier but it's just really really thin so it's kind of soaked in stabilize that kind of porous wood come back finish it again and hopefully everything will work this time but it's pretty annoyed with myself for a long that happened since my last table had almost the exact same thing so we'll go ahead and add finish and see how we did and this is the Osmo 3043 notice I added before I do have a full youtube video and blog post on adding this finish on how to get really a perfect finish even in a dusty shop which can be a real challenge for most of us small shop woodworkers I get a lot of questions about what buffer I'm using and this is a gem industries buffer it's kind of a repurposed floor sander I think it is and that can actually be used for sanding wood too I just find it is a little bit big for most sanding but what I'm doing here is going back with 600 grit after it cured a day later adding another coat and when you're doing that sanding you really need to make sure you get just it really perfectly even sanding any blotches are really gonna show up so go back do another coat with this 3043 buff it off do it a third time that's what I did there sand it a third time with a 600 grit and doing one final coat with a 30 43 and I know this is a little bit rushed so I do recommend you watch my other YouTube video on this finishing process before you dive and try it yourself the good news is the tactic we did to fix that kind of soft or porous about whatever you want to call it it worked finish it looks absolutely perfect I just couldn't have been more happy with it you can see here how much Sheen you actually can get off of this hard wax type of finish so really cool finished process highly recommend trying it yourself overall the CA trick worked and now I'm ready to move on to the base I had a local fabricator named brace and steel custom fabricated me to space and he did an amazing job and he's done several bases for me before so I knew he would and I also knew his measurements would be exactly right and this base was done before my top was so that's why I had to make sure my top was exactly the right size because I knew his base is gonna be the right size and if I didn't cut the top just right definitely wasn't gonna look great since this is one of those bases that comes all the way out to the very edge and now I'm going ahead and adding in these threaded inserts and the most important thing when you're doing these sort of inserts is making sure you're using the right drill bit size and I will say when you're doing them in epoxy they're which I hate adding threaded insert in epoxy I'm just so afraid of cracking the epoxy I did use a slightly oversize bit for that and then added a little bit extra epoxy you can see kind of a souping in there but normally you want to make sure you use the exact right size bit for your threaded inserts otherwise that would kind of split out you at least I have a tendency to go a little bit small on my holes and so if you use the right correct slightly larger drill bit size they will go in so much easier and no Terra and either you can see just a snug up really nice so make sure you use the right drill bit size for your threaded insert it's kind of the theme of this part of the video the space will be going to powder coat as soon as I'm done here says I'm doing one final test fit where I insert every bolt make sure thinks it's just right so I know everything will fit just perfect when it comes back from powder coat if you've been paying attention you might know what I'm about to say and that is that I actually have a full video on my photography method so I will add a link to that in the video description along with links to everything I'm used in the video like this photography backdrop we went through a ton of colors trying to get the perfect topper for this base and I will say the iPhone video it looks really orangish in person it looks amazing so the photos I took looked great but don't kind of go by what you see here on the video I'll show some photos the end but a does my look much better in person and as here on video you're probably wondering what I thought of the liquid glass epoxy by now and I will say that I absolutely loved it and I should also go disclaim it they did send me the epoxy for free they didn't give me any money to make the video and I told them upfront that I was gonna report good or bad on what I thought of the epoxy but no I thought it was incredible I I've had problems with eco epoxy going over an inch and three quarters before this didn't have any problem going up to that two and a quarter it cured super hard I've had other epoxies that didn't never really cured super hard so I was really happy with how hard it cured it doesn't mean that another later table I do is it might have a bad result because I've had that before where I've had a great table with one epoxy then the next Taylor did didn't turn out as well but I will say I can't wait to try it another table with this epoxy I would love to hear from you guys in the comments um first of all would you think of this table and second of all what epoxies have you guys had great experience with and maybe epoxies you haven't had the best experiences with i will advise you to try to keep it pretty clean but let me know in the comments which epoxies you've had good experiences and maybe not so good experiences with

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 6,540,402

Rating: 4.9195514 out of 5

Keywords: DIY WOODWORKING, diy projects, epoxy table, river table, resin table, diy epoxy table, diy epoxy art, ecopoxy, ecopoxy table, woodworking, diy dining table, diy coffee table, walnut table, made in pdx, creative idea, resin table top, resin art, how its made, how it's made

Id: DNRxlQVKf1U

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020