How to Epoxy Over Uneven Surfaces Like Barnwood

hey everyone mike from northern ridge designs here again in this video i'll be making six barn wood table tops finished with epoxy these table tops are repurposed out of 100 plus year old barn wood and are for a local brewery called ramshackle brewing company in jonesville michigan they needed the extremely weathered barn wood to have a cleanable surface yet still fit with their ram shackled theme so i stopped just short of a glass-like finish and left a few highs and lows if you're wondering how to epoxy over very rough surfaces keep watching and i hope you find this video helpful [Music] all right here we go step one i gotta clean this old barn wood up it's pretty uneven it's pretty weathered i have some small pieces some large pieces so i'm gonna pick and choose and find the best chunks i need to make six table tops total so i'm gonna speed things up you don't need to see all the cuts but i'm gonna stack the stuff under weight i'm a little concerned about the old barn wood twisting on me after i after i made the cuts and the weight should take care of that i've got some three-quarter inch plywood here this is going to be the backer this is on the underside of the of the table tops it's going to have a nice solid base for the legs to attach to kind of debated a lot about how much overhang to leave the the barn wood was a little flimsy but i think i've ended up making the right decision leaving about two inches all the way around with the plywood underneath it really made things pretty solid so here i'm just using some black matte spray paint kind of seal up the bottoms also to make a little visually visually a little more appealing you're not really going to see the bottom i did sand it very smooth so it will at least feel nice if a customer runs their hand underneath now i'm kind of planning out where the backer board's going to go again like i said i ended up leaving around two inches i believe it was all the way around but i'm gonna apply a liquid nail that's what i'm gonna use to hold the three-quarter inch plywood to the barn wood really going to make sure i use plenty of it and i use a lot of weight like i said this barn wood was pretty uneven so i kind of figured if i put enough weight on it it's going to smash it down make it nice and flat and in the end that's really what it ended up with although it does take a lot of weight so here i'm kind of doing a little trial and error as to what to use to to put on top of the plywood i don't really want to dent it up and make any cuts but i know i'm gonna have to put cinder blocks on it so i found some high density cardboard that actually worked out pretty well lots of weight lots of weight i'm gonna end up using batteries tractor tires just pretty much retractor weights pretty much anything tractor tire probably would have worked too but tractor weights so just about anything i get my hands on i could only do three at a time because i didn't have enough weight in the shop so here we go getting the second board around notice i'm not making any circles with liquid nail it's always kind of a concern is that if you if you make circles and you get too much of a seal you actually have an air pocket there so made sure i didn't enclose any of the liquid seal beads and here's what it looked like once i got all my weight stacked down there see i got like four cinder blocks there it did actually flatten things out quite a bit you still see though it is kind of uneven though which the epoxy that's kind of the point of this video the epoxy is going to take care of a lot of that see here we got the batteries okay so i've taken the weight off this is kind of the finished product kind of see what we have to work with here some pretty big checks there in the weathering i'm gonna have to put tape along the edge to kind of help seal in the the epoxy here we got some nail holes i mean it's beautiful barn wood it's beautiful wood and it's it's great that we're finding a purpose for it here i was able to leave a couple nail heads sorry about the camera footage it's my wife chewed me out for this she said i was screwing up the range of focus or some particular camera term but kind of new to the filming world so bear with me here as you can see there was a large knot on the side of this board that's going to get filled i'm using copper metallic powder as well as some red metallic powder i tried using green and i really didn't like how it looked as as we'll see here in a little bit so we're going to fix that up but right now i'm just prepping and prep work is hugely important for any kind of epoxy work all right so i'm using stone coat countertop quick coat epoxy to fill these holes and voids as you can see it was kind of amber colored it been left out into the the sunlight a little bit and it does not affect it whatsoever the strength of the epoxy plus i knew i was adding colorant so it really wasn't going to matter here's that green i was talking about trying out some different colors and just really wasn't happy with how that looked with the barn wood so i ended up routering that out and mixing in some copper and it ended up looking kind of like an aged copper oxidized copper there's some thickener product just to help make sure it doesn't run out of the holes too too fast that powder that you saw me adding try to use a still hand not slop the epoxy all over the place here we go i'm adding that copper to the green some of it got covered up some of it you could see the green through and it really ended up looking neat so after talking to the client ramshackle brewery they didn't want epoxy right on top of the barn wood because i showed them a sample and it just made the barn wood way too dark so what i'm actually doing here is painting on a couple layers of spar urethane helmsman and it seals it helps to seal up the wood but it darkens it a little bit but not as much as the epoxy and whatever darkness it's at after the spar urethane that's what it's going to be even after i add the epoxy because the spare urethane has done the sealing it's a little tough to kind of get it into those little nooks and crannies plus this stuff is super dry so it is sucking up a lot of this a lot of this product ended up using quite a bit more than i thought i was going to so i'm just kind of really slopping it in there but i'm making sure i don't leave too much pooled in the little cracks i want to have all those little nooks and crannies for the epoxy to adhere to so this is what it looks like sparta urethane right over the the epoxy copper and the little fillers i am going to sand that down before i apply my first coat of epoxy i also lightly sand this spar urethane as well i took my time folded up some sandpaper and got in between some of those cracks to help with the mechanical bond between the epoxy and this newly sealed surface here's the last two boards and again i apologize for the camera work but here you're kind of getting an idea of just how deep those checks are so we're going to fast forward here and this is my first coat of epoxy i poured it on and i used a paint brush to move it around move it into the cracks move it where i wanted it i know it's not going to be anywhere near near perfectly flat but i know i'm going to do a couple of these seal coats to help build up the epoxy levels and flatten everything out i apologize for not putting in the footage of me pouring the first coat but that's really not what this video is about and i have a couple other videos you can check out if you're wondering how i do the seal coat process so here i've sanded that first seal coat i made sure i sanded the little colored epoxy areas as well they clouded up but once i had the next layer of epoxy all those little scratches disappear and those scratches are important for creating that mechanical bond between your different layers of epoxy so i've added some tape to the edges where i have some really bad weathering and some checking and that's going to help build that up instead of the epoxy just kind of pouring over the edge okay mixing up some epoxy for our second seal coat i figured about one ounce per square foot might have had a little extra just because i knew that i was dealing with a lot of little nooks and crannies that needed to be filled so i'm just going to use the paint brush again to move that around here's kind of a better look at it where the high spots are i really wanted to move the epoxy off of that i didn't need to build up an epoxy i needed to move it into where the low spots were mainly around where the tape is at the edge so we ended up with a smoother surface the end goal here as i mentioned the beginning in the intro is that we're trying to get to a cleanable surface but still look a little uneven a little rustic a little ram shackled which is the name of the brewery i think we ended up pulling that off in the end so just using my brush to work it in towards the edge i don't want to pull it on too thick don't forget the edges making sure to brush it in cutting down those drip marks you see there's quite a few bubbles in the epoxy itself once it spreads out the bubbles become less noticeable but i am torching uh using a propane torch three or four times for each layer just to make sure i get all those bubbles out before i move on to the next one before i let it cure move on to the next layer we'll be able to see the how the torch works here a little bit later in the video so this is after the second layer of epoxy you can see the highs and lows kind of where it pooled where it didn't that's all fine i haven't done my final flood coat yet you can see that things are starting to even out much better on the edges a lot of the weathering has been filled in and i'm going to get ready for my final flood coat here so if i didn't take the time to do the seal coats and to seal up those large checks then whatever i did for my final flood coat just would not end up very well alright so this flood coat i'm using three ounces of stone coat countertop epoxy per square foot i ended up having a little extra i scraped that off into a bucket which was fine because i knew i was going to be doing five other table tops i used a square notch trowel to move the epoxy around and then i used a paint brush to chop out those lines making sure i don't leave any lines because sometimes they will show up in the finished product if you don't use the paint brush to chop them out here i'm using a propane torch to get rid of the bubbles so you can watch them pop through the kind of satisfying process right there and just kind of slowly moving it back and forth not going to stay in one spot too long to burn the epoxy and i'm going to do this three or four times on the final flood coat just to make sure i do get all those bubbles out and now as i'm torching kind of a tip for you is to also be looking for any kind of bristles or perhaps a beard hair that fell into your project making sure you get that stuff out so here's another good look at the bubbles that we're dealing with in the final flood coat and for the third time i apologize for the camera work trying to hold the camera and do my torching but you can see the bubbles popping as we just move it to swipe it across there and it cleans up that surface if we didn't do the seal coats i have other videos on this those bubbles would just keep reappearing and if you have that sort of issue it's because you've probably skipped the seal coats here's a better look at that last bubble you see the red popping out on this one it's kind of a barn wood red that really ended up looking neat and here we go the final look at the final project everything's still wet at this point but you can see that things have leveled out pretty good and again as i said we're not trying to get to a total glass-like finish if i was i would simply aggressively sand this and do one more flood coat and we would have a perfect glass-like finish but that's not what the customer wanted and i really think this ended up fitting in perfectly with their theme one final look here you can see just how well things leveled out now this was on barn wood you could use this process for any kind of uneven surface and here's a look at those table tops in the final stage here at ramshackle brewery in jonesville michigan if you found this video helpful please give me a thumbs up check out some of the other videos you can also check out northernridgedesigns.com you can also check us out social media facebook instagram don't forget to hit that subscribe button

Channel: Northern Ridge Designs

Views: 70,319

Keywords: Barnwood, Epoxy, Epoxy table, Epoxy barnwood table, how to epoxy, epoxy resin, barnwood table, ramshackle brewery, brewery, brewing company, epoxy over uneven surface, epoxy finish, epoxy seal coat, spar urethane, helmsman, stone coat countertops, reclaimed wood, repurposed wood, barn wood table, barn wood, epoxy inlay, Resin, How to epoxy, Bar top, Seal coat, Epoxy finish, Sanding epoxy, Epoxy bar top, Multi layer epoxy, Epoxy bar, How to do epoxy, How to use epoxy

Id: 4kHykQoSbRs

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021