How to Make Epoxy Cutting Board | Step-by-Step Guide | #woodworking #resin

in today's video I'm going to walk you through a step-by-step process for how you can create an epoxy serving board this video is going to be a ton of fun I've been waiting on it for a long time so with no further Ado let's get [Music] started I have these black walnut slabs that are already killing Dred they're live at Edge and I've been waiting for the proper use for them this top slab has a check in it so that would be something that I just cut off anyway when I make a larger project so from this area of the slab here we're going to make the serving tray what I'm going to go ahead and do now is uh cut this into two pieces because of course we want the live edges of this serving tray on the inside so we get that River effect for the serving tray we are really close to our final width and length of this serving tray so now we're going to do is take some thickness off right now these slabs are about 2 in thick the mold we're going to use is about an inch and a half so I'm going to go ahead and pl this down to about an inch and 5/8 uh I will also use a jointing jig so that I take any wobble in these slabs I'm just going to go ahead and take that out now so here is my jointing jig set up all this is is a perfectly flat piece of plywood that we put our work piece on top of and then I've got some um sandpaper kind of wedged under the corners to take out any Rock in this work piece so now when the planer ples the top of the workpiece it's referencing against the perfectly flat board which will take out any wobble [Music] here so once you have your two slabs with one side um with The Rock totally eliminated you don't need the jointing jig anymore so you can just flip this over now the planer is referencing against a perfectly flat side and you just run it through the planer like that so here's a quick tip for you black walnut has kind of two parts to the wood you have the I don't know what this is called actually maybe Heartwood and then you have the sapwood I definitely know this is called sapwood so Heartwood and black walnut has that nice dark uh color and then the sapwood has an awesome contrasting light color and the sapwood obviously is more on the outside of the tree well the Heartwood is closer to the inside of the tree so why am I telling you all this it's because you need to determine what you want your board to look like I like having uh a nice contrast kind of a chocolate and vanilla and so I plane more from the top which is going to remove more of the sapwood so you have mostly Heartwood but some sap wood so if you plane from here you're adding sap wood if you plane from here you're adding Heartwood now it is time to remove the bark from these slabs please please please please do not try to make a serving board and leave the bark on as a personal favor to me please do not do it because eventually with pretty much any type of wood bark will fall off it is designed once it is fully um you know Dy this bark should start coming off anyway you can even see here it's kind of like oh mean well I can't get it right now but it's it's wanting to chip away there and so we're just going to go ahead and remove the bark we're going to sand these live edges down in a way that preserves the Live Edge but does not have bark on it we are getting ready to break out the mold and get ready for the most fun part of this build the epoxy pore now I want to give a huge shout out to crafted elements this is their molds that I'll be using in this video and what's awesome about these molds is that they're made out of silicone and so maybe you've seen uh videos before on YouTube of people building molds and then lining them with t and if it's not done you know correctly and not cocked perfectly there could be an epoxy leak which can be so expensive I mean epoxy is is not cheap and so if it leaks all over your shop floor overnight and then cures not only is it a huge waste of money it's also a huge mess so yeah anyways for all of those reasons I love crafted elements silicone molds they're they're they're high quality they are worth uh they're worth the money you'll pay for them you can reuse them over and over and over so check the description of this video uh for the link to this mold I'll also link their website they have tons of different shapes sizes for you know serving trays coasters all kinds of different silicone molds and other cool stuff at crafted elements so I'm going to go ahead and unpackage this this is the box that it comes in it's got some helpful instructions uh about using their uh their molds which I will read later and and here is the silicone mold this thing is heavy y'all it's heavy all right so it is time for the most fun part the uh epoxy pour now before you start mixing up epoxy and getting everything poured look at what I've done I've laid everything out I have plenty of mixing cups uh here with the ratios on the back that are from Total booat these ratio uh calculators are super helpful I'll walk you through these in a second we have our mold Rel which we're going to spray onto the crafted elements mold so do not um you know Skip that step that's super important we'll go over that in a second we have our two-part epoxy we have our dye which is from Black Diamond pigments a really big fan of theirs and then we have some clean stir sticks that my groomsmen wrote um I don't even they wrote little life lessons on these these uh stir sticks when I got married so fun fact for you there and then we got we got of course have the mold up here I have gloves I always wear U you know good gloves when I'm working with epoxy and also I have some weights back here uh Pro tip if you go to Goodwill you can get uh weights for way cheaper than if you bought them new and they work just as well so I just took this mold out of the box if you're reusing your mold which these crafted element molds are designed to be used over and over and over uh if so if you're reusing it wash it out with soap and water just make sure it is clean what I'm going to go ahead and do is uh shake up this uh mold release give it a nice shape make sure it's good and we're just going to spray it on the mold make sure you get on the bottom of the mold also the the edges and what this uh mold release is going to do is make the mold last longer and so um I think crafted elements says that you know if you use this you can get at least maybe 20 to 30 uses out of these molds which if you're selling these serving trays uh the mold will pay for itself many many many times over all right we're going to go ahead and drop our uh boards in here another great thing about these molds is if you don't want to use the entire uh area of the mold this one is is 12 by 18 just put in a spacer and so this will be about a 10 in by 8 18in board uh so we'll just use less epoxy here um and then this this will just trim off afterwards really quickly I want to walk you guys through um how I'm going to measure out the epoxy total boat uh I'm using their epoxy they make an awesome product uh they sell these little measuring and stir cups and they're super helpful notice there's uh different uh basically calculators here so you have the 1: one mix 2:1 mix uh 3:1 and 5:1 we we are using a three just double checking yes we're using a 3: one mix uh it'll usually tell you on the front of the bottle of the res that you're using so this might look confusing it's like what are all these numbers I just think about it you read left to right and so you take uh your first part the three parts and you're going to fill it up to in my case I'm going to go all the way up to number three so I'll fill that up with the resin then I'll fill the hardener up until I get to the number three um so you know if you need a little bit of epoxy resin to one hardener to one uh because we're going left to right resin to two hardener to two resin to three hardener to three so that's basically how it works find what mix you're using and then however much you need to mix up just go left to right for the you know part a first and then Part B I'm going to go ahead and mix this up I'm wearing gloves you probably can't see it but I'm also wearing glasses just in case this um splashes up we definitely don't want um we definitely don't want this to get in your eyes so the resin is part A so we're going to use more of this so we'll pour this first there's probably going to be a film here yep now you guys can watch as I take 5 minutes to try to get this off with my [Music] gloves so we are ready to pour and the timer doesn't really start uh until we mix these two together that's when you want to start working not like in a rush but semi quickly because that chemical reaction will start this is a 3:1 mix so we're at the 3:1 start with part A on the right and you go to Part B we're going to fill it up to where it says number three here all right here we go it it is time to add Part B you want to make sure to mix this really well if it's not mixed well it probably won't cure well there might be Pockets that you know cure a little less uh hard so you want to make sure to take your time here the working time on this epoxy is between 10 and 30 minutes and so so just kind of have in your mind you want to get this poured in about 15 minutes so don't take time away from stirring you can kind of tell once it gets uniform I'm going to go ahead and add my [Music] color now keep in mind when you stir the color in here it's going to look a little more rich in the stir cup up because it's deeper than the final pour will be so just kind of keep that in mind the color is going to lighten up once you pour [Music] [Music] it that's looking pretty good [Music] all right we have this mixed up just about to the color that I like so this looks really good uh now what we're going to do is the poure but before we do that I'm going to go ahead and put some weights on these boards so they don't float these are some three lb weights and you can also I mean you don't have to use weights I'm using also some one two three blocks but you just don't want these boards floating up all right the Moment of Truth here we go oh yeah this looks really good I don't have quite enough epoxy so what I'm going to do really quickly is add a little bit more and then we're going to kind of mix this in all right here comes the second pour and I'm going to kind of swirl this around I'll probably come back and add a little swirl this is very liquidy right now that off there this looks awesome so now what I'm going to do is you can see all of these bubbles bubbles will kind of continue to uh come to the surface as this epoxy cures we don't want bubbles in the final pour that'll make uh the serving tray look kind of hazy so I'm going to pop those with a blow torch you don't have to really like you know take a long time you'll kind of see these clear up really quickly awesome and that looks so much better it's like glass now all right so it's been several days it's actually been about a week that I've allowed this to cure uh there are some bubbles that popped up here so uh it's totally cured but and these bubbles are right on the surface so they'll probably get you know know planed down but uh I probably should have hit this with a torch one more time maybe a few hours after the pour what we're going to do is go ahead and pull this out of the mold I can already tell you guys that uh before I even pull this out of the mold this crafted elements mold has done such a better job than molds I've just made in the past out of you know wood and tape or whatever um just because there's been less sink essentially so uh let's pull this out look how clean that mold is it's awesome so we can reuse that of course and here is the serving board we did have a little bit of epoxy kind of you know seep down here uh we also have some bubbles here so we'll have to do some finish work of course um but I mean overall not a lot of not a lot of epoxy leak at all I'm about to trim off the extra board we used to fill up the space in the mold since I'm cutting black walnut and epoxy I'm wearing ear protection eye protection and lung [Music] [Music] protection I'm making really light passes in the planer uh this serving tray is pretty wide and so just go really slow you don't want to mess up the epoxy you don't want to get in a rush so don't try to take off too much material at one [Music] [Music] time [Music] right here I'm going from 120 to 180 to 220 to 320 make sure not to you know jump too quickly in grits you don't want to go from a 120 to a 320 that won't give you a good finish so just kind of Step Up Your your grits as you go and you will get an amazing finish [Music] this is some food safe Butcher Block finish and this is the first coat of course but after I put on the first coat I'm going to sand it down with uh 220 and 320 and then put on a second coat and I may even do a third coat depending on how that second coat looks but yeah at least do two coats and I would probably recommend [Music] three thank you so much for watching this video let me know in the comments if you decide to try this and uh what you think about how my serving tray turned out I want to give a shout out to crafted elevates and total boat they make amazing products and uh just like anything I do on this channel I would never uh recommend a product to you guys unless I really really believe it is a highquality product and totalboat is for epoxy crafted elements is for amazing epoxy molds makes their job so much easier I I can't explain to you how fun it is to make these especially with the crafted elements mold until you do it it's just it's so much fun experimenting with the different colors different live edges uh so much fun well hey that's all I have for you today thank you so much for checking out this video please hit the Subscribe button because like I said I will be doing more of these projects soon I might even do a video on um like different types of epoxy shaky boards making a amount of burs uh crazy like edges different types of wood so if you're interested in that video let me know in the comments and uh I can I can make it and kind of share the journey with you guys hey really appreciate y'all watching we'll talk to you [Music] soon

Channel: Ben Grimsley Woodworking

Views: 13,667

Keywords: Epoxy, cutting, board, resin, charcuterie, live, edge, cutting board, woodworking, wood, DIY, tips, complete, guide, Ben, Grimsley, Grimsely, project

Id: JubeLHRYl80

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2023