How-to Apply Epoxy To Wood

[Music] we're continuing on with our woodworking project of coating this piece of wood with epoxy so today we are using the west system 105 epoxy resin the 207 clear hardener and we're going to be using their 800 series rollers which are a thin foam roller that they recommend for epoxy we're going to use a couple of their mixing sticks and to keep our hands nice and clean they're disposable gloves okay so let's get ready to mix our epoxy so one of the questions we get asked a lot in the store is kind of how to use the west system epoxy i'm by no means perfect at it but i've got a good general idea one of the things i do like to do when i start out so these cans obviously a little rough there are shopkins uh what we're going to do is do a little sacrificial pump of these each of these cans before we get started so that way we know that the pump itself uh doesn't have any air bubbles in it you know it's completely reset the way it should be pop backed up so this has a little bit of waste obviously but uh you know as we can see there we go so that one definitely needed a little bit so now we've done our sacrificial piece next we're going to start our mixing so what we're using today is the 105 resin the 207 hardener this is our clear hardener so this will dry to a clear finish kind of important to note that this isn't uv stabilized so if we're going to put any of this wood outside we should be putting a marine varnish over top of it in our case this is staying inside so we're not going to worry about it but you know for future note so with mixing i always like to go one slow pump of resin yeah this isn't working two one squirt of hardener one of resin one hardener and one morpher could measure one resin and one hardener and now we will stir it up for a good minute so that doesn't look like much material you know it's very little that's coming out but this stuff does go really far the coverage on one of those gallons is actually like three or four hundred square feet so i always start with a little bit you can always add more but it's better not to waste it so that way we kind of see how far we go i think this will be more than enough for what we need today it's important to get it nice and mixed up that way we've got uniform consistency throughout and it cures properly [Music] do [Music] so i am realizing now we have way too much epoxy on here but that is okay it happens knock it off onto the table let it cure and it does make the table a little bit stronger [Music] so [Music] so i'm just trying to see now in the light reflection make sure i get the epoxy everywhere in the wood obviously it's pretty flat but it's not perfect so there's a little bit of ridges where my putty spreader will not get into so i'm just making sure that i've got good coverage before i grab our little foam brush and with this guy i am just going to drag it and get through any more imperfections spread it out a little bit thin not really applying any pressure here just letting the brush drag along the surface and with the wood grain hopefully resulting in a nice mirror-like wet look all right so looks like we've got epoxy on the entire top side here we've kind of smoothed it out a little bit i don't see any big build up puddles runs anything like that so we're going to give this 16 hours to cure up we'll probably come back tomorrow afternoon check it out and we'll see how it looks from there probably going to have a little bit air bubbles so what we'll do is again separate into thirds we're going to leave one section untouched one section we're gonna wet sand and do a little bit and then one section we're gonna use rubbing compound on so okay so we're gonna mix up some epoxy as always we wanna be very mindful that we're getting the right mix ratio so we're gonna one pump to one pump and one pump to one pump and that should be more than enough for our little piece of wood here we are gonna stir it up [Music] i'm going to put this on as thin as i possibly can and that way we get less air bubbles and less of an uneven surface better to do more coats and have thin coats than to do less coats but a lot of material [Music] it's kind of hard to see through a camera but there is a little bit of imperfections that we can see and that's just bubbles from the roller and bubbles from the epoxy doing its thing what we're going to try to do now is we're going to tip it so we are going to slide this brush with just a tiny bit of pressure over top of the surface just to kind of smear it all together and that should give us a slightly more smooth finish when this cures instead of using a foam brush you can also cut your leftover epoxy roller sleeve in half on the lengthwise making yourself two small foam brushes hold on to them with a pair of needle nose pliers or similar and then you've made yourself a little foam brush using the remaining pieces that you started with or one of these works as well my view i can see that the epoxy is starting to smear the bubbles are nearly gone are mostly gone and i can see the lines of epoxy left over from the brush that follow the grain of the wood that's kind of an ideal circumstance hopefully it cures up in a similar fashion get it nice and smooth so you should be able to see some lines in that wood there nice thin coat of epoxy coat number two we'll let this cure up for another couple days we'll again come back in sand and we'll do a third coat [Music] okay so we are back working on our epoxy wood project so last time we started this one we tried to buff it with the buffer on this section here and we ran into some issues because the epoxy wasn't fully cured so it was my mistake i was a little overzealous tried to coat it the day before and then buff it the next day which is not a good idea so it smeared quite a bit i also didn't wet sand it enough so i had some imperfections anyways so either way i went back after that i put another coat of epoxy on it after sanding it down and then wet sanded from here to here so as you can see in the light there it's a little bit of a duller finish but it is very smooth to the touch so what i did here is wet sand with 800 grit sandpaper uh then thousand then twelve hundred then three thousand uh to get it nice and smooth and this section here that is still shiny i left untouched that is just the rolled on clear epoxy there are some imperfections some bumps things like that so i'm going to attempt to do now is buff this with the buffing wheel and the 3m perfected wax and polish that should give it a nice shine so i'm going to smear that material on and buff it until it's gone away and we will see how it turns out [Music] okay so we've buffed this now turned out a lot better than last time so i use the 3m perfected wax and polish and what that product states is that you put it on as a thin film and you buff it until it's gone so i did that i tried to get on there as soon as possible put a couple coats on really quite happy with how smooth it is on the top you can kind of see the light reflecting off it now that you couldn't before again this side is still smooth but it's the original epoxy so you can feel the bump difference when you touch the wood fortunately you can't do that during video but if you come in the store this will be on display so we will probably leave this the way it is for now that will be on display in a store showing our west system buffed epoxy and then our west system epoxy just rolled on and yeah maybe once in a while we'll put another coat of wax on it because it will get marked up being in the store in our staff room in our kitchen we have a similar piece of wood to this using as our kitchen counter i've coated it with the epoxy and i've wet sanded and buffed it like this the reason i did that as i wanted a wood countertop but i wanted to be you know have some durability and some protection with that particular countertop i mean you could leave a wet glass on there for a few days take it away you're not going to see a ring mark you're not going to see a stain you can drop whatever wine pop food on it it's not going to stain it's not going to mark so the nice thing about that you know you get a glossy wood finish uh you've got durability and protection using a marine grade epoxy and uh you know i've got a nice style if you want to go through and buff it uh and then obviously to keep it shiny you know maybe once a year after it gets marked up you can go back and just apply another coat of wax and keep making it smoother and smoother another advantage you know if you have to change something let's say cut into it install something new appliance whatever it might be well then you just sand down that area you apply your epoxy you sand it all out and then you buff it again and no one even knows it was ever any different so lots of functionality lots of options in terms of doing this a lot of people have also done this for bar tops in restaurants and things like that again really strong durability you get a bunch of drunk people that leave you know bottles and glasses on there and they're not going to mark it up and if you happen to drop something on it it's highly unlikely that you're going to break the surface the epoxy or even dent it for that matter and again if you do easy fix to put it back together so nice idea the only thing i'll mention about this is if you did want to do this let's say for an outside table like an outside dining room picnic table wood treatment whatever it might be we would want to go ahead next and put a coat of marine varnish over top of this something that's uv stabilized that way you give your epoxy kind of like a sunscreen a uv stabilization so that it doesn't degrade in the sunlight so if we were doing that step we would have done our wet sanding like we did and instead of then using the buffing wheel we would have applied a marine varnish on top of this we'd probably end up with near the exact same shine but we would have the ability to put it outside but overall nice smooth finish pretty happy the way it turned out and uh next up we'll do that countertop the same way [Music] you

Channel: Dan's Nautical Shop

Views: 5,721

Rating: 4.647059 out of 5

Keywords: Epoxy, Wood working, How-to Epoxy, Dan's Nautical, Boating, Boat restoration

Id: eg7wzPqfB6I

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020