How To Make Epoxy Resin Cutting Boards - DIY River Resin Charcuterie Boards + Big Time Saving Molds

hey guys it's shawn from crafted elements today's video is going to be a full build on going from raw live edge wood to a finished epoxy resin and wood chicory board just like this this is going to be a fairly long one because they go over all elements of the build so uh get ready for a good ride anyway we are going to be using this very cool piece of ambrosia maple or wormy maple and essentially we're going to be using one of our cool chicory board silicone molds so if you're watching my other videos you know we probably you probably know that we do sell these at our website at boardmolds.com or craftedelements.com and then click on the mold section at the top but essentially we use these and we build these and we sell these to makers just like yourselves um because they're awesome uh but no seriously they're better than the wooden duct tape method which i've demonstrated in another video that's a typically a wooden tuck eight mold that you have to build yourself there's also things that make hdp molds which are also pretty good um they're just not flexible and they still require work to unscrew screw reseal etc which is why we prefer to use the silicone molds anyway this video is going to start with cutting these pieces preparing these pieces putting them in the mold talking about the different types of resin to use and once it's set in a couple of days we can play it sand it oil it and be done you can see the finished product let's get started all right so we have a nice thick piece of ambrosia maple here and i really like this part of the the slab so i'm actually going to use this part to make our screw board so our mold is 24 inches by 12 by one and a half so we can we can actually technically just cut this and put it in i'm going to plane this first because it is a little bit thicker than the height of the mold but again we're gonna figure out which pieces we want to actually make our um our board out of so the first thing we're gonna do is cut 24 inches essay this way we're going to cut this in half probably take a little bit off inverse the pieces to create the river effect and lay it in the mold to see what it looks [Music] like [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right once we've got our wood prepped and cut we can simply drop it in this mold this is how easy it is watch wait for it there you go it's ready this mold didn't need any prep just drop it down and go so the next thing we're going to need to do is calculate how much epoxy resin we need and to do that it's a fairly simple equation it's cubic inches divided by 1.8 and that will give you the amount of ounces of resin you'll need you can then convert ounces to milliliters or gallons or whatever um so in this case we've got our 24 inch mold so it's 24 inches in the center uh you've got an inch and a half of depth and then the trick of doing this it's a little tricky with this board because there's such a wide section here and skinny here but you want to have the average um width okay so i mean you know here we've got two they've got two we've got three and a half all the way over here we've got five and a half so conservatively we can say the average width of this channel here is three inches so it's 24 by three inches average width by 1.5 inch height um that gives you roughly 108 and then you'll divide that by 1.8 to get 60 ounces so we need 60 ounces of resin or roughly 1800 milliliters roughly half a gallon um now choosing the resin i did another video on this in the youtube channel um but if you didn't see it here's the gist of it you want to make sure you have a casting resin and you also want to make sure you get the casting resin that will support this depth of casting this is an inch and a half a lot of casting resins will only do up to an inch and it really has to do with the volume and heat generated when you pour a lot of resin um volume wise into a mold and the exothermic reaction starts to occur it gets you you end up generating heat and if it's too hot and gets too hot too quickly you end up just bubbling up and curling and it's it's gross it'll destroy your uh it'll destroy your project so for example something like this this tabletop art resin this is not what you use for this this is not for casting this is for thin layers of um thin layers on top of the piece of wood they can also be used to make resin art like this so you've got a piece of wood here and you've got just a thin layer of resin that's what this stuff is for you want to use casting resin so a couple of big brands uh total boat um eco epoxy makes a good product there's a lot of different casting maze epoxies mas epoxies makes um a good product there's a lot of different products out there we're in canada and rusty design out in brampton i believe ontario uh has a product the import from china it's fairly inexpensive but it's pretty good um and it's this is a slow cast so this stuff is actually made for like a two inch pour which is what we would be close to doing here so here's a slow uh setting resin uh what that's going to do is effectively it's going to heat up but not as much as something like the art resin in a thicker volume would um and it's going to take two maybe even three days to set so it's going to take a really long time to step but it's not going to generate the amount of heat that would effectively ruin the piece and bubble up everything so typically when you're doing like a big project like a river table you end up with like a slow pour slow curing resin like this anyway let's get started here mixing our resin we actually uh calculated out based on this bond we need 60 ounces so we're not going to need just one we're going to need two of these these are super handy i bought some amazon uh arp mix painting mixed cup they're 1100 milliliters of 40 ounces so an ab mix epoxy resin this particular one is three parts a with one part b so you can do i know some people say do b first to a first i'm not really sure what the best option is um i think the key is as long as you are consistent so i'm gonna pop these open i'm gonna get my gloves on and we're gonna end up with 60 ounces so basically i'm going to mix 30 ounces uh in each one and because it's a three to one we can go i think well we could do eight to twenty four so we do eight uh eight ounces of this per cup and then 24 ounces of this per cup that'll give us uh our three to one ratio there's eight ounces there eight ounces there you definitely want to make sure you wear gloves and to be honest you probably have a respirator on as well um especially if you're very sensitive to smell um okay so we're gonna go up to 32 ounces uh 24 84 sorry all right so we've got 32 ounces so we did because about not three chances of this but 24 deaths and eight of the part b which gives us our three to one ratio then we're going to gently stir these and i say gently because if you stir vigorously with epoxy resin you end up getting bubbles in this um which can then come out in your piece um some people will say oh you know say some people if you're hardcore and if you're building these professionally and doing a lot of them you might want to invest in something called a degassing chamber or a vacuum chamber what that effectively does is after you mix all your resin you put it in this box turn on the vacuum and it sucks all the air bubbles out of the resin and that's going to really end up with you're going to end up with the clearest resin i don't have one of those i don't really see the need i don't do a lot of these boards um do mostly for demonstration of our molds um i used to build a lot of boards but that was uh that was a couple of years ago when uh when i was doing a lot of that stuff and we built a lot of kit stuff and we also import a lot of home products now but it's not but besides the point um what i'm getting at is you can kind of do a good job if you uh if you just mix this gently and then uh make sure you get all the bubbles out of the surface of your pore with a heat torch or a um a heat gun all right so now that we've decently did an initial mix of these it's time for pigments [Music] this is my fun bit of pigments here um i've got products and a little bit everybody got that black diamond uh you can get these on amazon they sell the small packs as well as large packs jacquard makes them um so you've got the pearl pigments and then you've also got the the alcohol based pigments so like pigments like this uh wouldn't give you like that pearl effect maybe more of a solid color or an opaque color but just a clear color uh most of the time when you're seeing so for example this is what you would get with like a typical alcohol pigment pigment you get that kind of a clear i'm gonna say boring but just a plain blue whereas when you're using the pearl pigments you get the really cool kind of waves and swirls and that kind of stuff and that's to be honest that's what most people like um now in this case because it's a maple that we're using i'm actually going to mix pigments i'm going to use [Music] the sky blue and carbon black how much pigment to use that's honestly up to you because it really there's not really a room for this because um if you want to have like a a very um opaque board then you use more pigment so you get the less transparency if you want just a little bit of pigment and you want to be able to see through the board you use less paper less less of this stuff so it's a little bit trial and error um so in this case i'm just going to actually use a third of a teaspoon of each color in each uh batch and then we're going to mix it and then we'll end up effectively a dark glue because we're mixing a bright blue and a black i think that dark blue would look really really nice with this with this lighter maple put your mask on because these pigments are like um what would be the word but they're they're almost like flower on steroids they just if you get them in the air they just kind of float everywhere so you don't want to be breathing that stuff in [Music] then we gently mix don't do it too faster this pigment will become airborne make sure you get around all the edges kind of doing this motion because if there's any hardener or b part or any um pigment you want to make sure that it really gets mixed really well because the worst part is having a non-mixed section of this resin and it doesn't set correctly in your board and you've got kind of this like goopy section in your board that didn't set so you want to make sure this is really well mixed and you know if you don't like the color you can change it you can add more blue pigment if you want to lighten this up i personally like this i think this is awesome um it's like a it's like a midnight blue which is going to look really really cool with the with a light maple so again we're going to keep mixing keep mixing i think the rule is typically three minutes of decent mixing and that will give you uh that'll give you proper proper mix just make sure that there's no pigment left obviously like you've got some pigment here so you want to make sure you get rid of all the pigment mix it in really really well and then we can start on the fun part so once these are really well mixed you can do your pouring now one thing i mentioned earlier with these silicone molds is that you know you don't really have an easy mechanism for holding the wood down now why do you want to hold the wood down well when you put the resin in there the resin is going to effectively if you don't have anything on top it's going to start lifting the wood it's going to go under the wood and create almost like a floating piece of wood which is something you don't want so i use these small weights but you know that's even a little bit fancy you could use uh a brick or rock um you could use you know a piece of vinyl and h or hdp and put them on top as well so in case you get resin on there it will come off as well but i find these uh these work just fine and that's sufficient enough weight to hold down the wood well here goes nothing you want to do this gently don't do this crazy if you pour it thinner and pour it out like this any unmixed parts of the resin are going to start mixing and remember we estimated the amount of resin based on that calculation on this it was really really hard because there's such a wide section back here so i may have too much resin but we'll find out really soon when i have just the perfect amount we'll see resin is expensive so you want to make sure you uh get that all out of there um you might be asking because if you've watched other videos you've watched other people do this why don't i pre-seal the edges of the wood first so that's something that that people do especially when they're making tables but here's the thing guys i've actually seen some tables made a few years ago using that method like pre-sealing the edges uh come apart so i mean as you know wood expands and contracts right that's pretty obvious resin is super super strong but here's what happens when you pre-seal the edges of the wood you effectively create a thin layer of resin on the outside of the wood um which which helps avoid the bubbles in doing this process but then when you pour the huge volume of resin like this it doesn't penetrate the wood at all so you're effectively just bonding resin to resin and you're not ending up with an awesome connection from the resin to the wood uh just a small surface connection so that's why i do it this way some people might argue with me but i've seen tables come apart at the resin wood barrier resin wood intersection rather because the edges were pre-sealed so it's kind of like a toss-up do you want to have to deal with bubbles and getting rid of more bubbles with your torch or do you want to deal with failure down the road i think in the case of a chicory board it probably doesn't matter it's not mission critical not super crazy expensive you know this board once it's done maybe it's going to be a couple hundred bucks uh you know retail value if i wanted to sell it it's not uh it's not like a five thousand dollar table where here you're going to be really hurting if you have to replace it so up to you pre-seal the edges don't push the pc pre-seal the edges um but obviously pre-sealing the edges also really takes another day right because you've got to apply the resin first let it set and then go okay well there we go we have finished this as you know i mixed the resin a little bit what you're going to find is over the next hour you're going to have bubbles coming out of here and i'm going to take a video of that as well to show you but the way to get rid of those is quite simply with a torch so you've got the torch with an end on it start this big bad boy up and then just go over gently and you can maybe see on the camera you start to see that sparkle that's all these tiny little micro bubbles uh bursting as i go over with the torch so i've done that once now but i think in 20 or 30 minutes i'm gonna have to come back and do that again this is probably not something you want to just pour in at least for the day otherwise you're gonna have bubbles in your in your resin um now a lot of people like that swirl effect this this kind of like you know that okay but doing that right now especially with a slow cure resin is not going to end up like this if i did a time lapse on this video you'd see this is effectively going to be a universal one color thing if i left it for the next five or six hours because effectively the heat's gonna it's gonna heat up and it's just gonna start mixing and it's gonna be all like that so what you actually need to do uh in the case of a slow cure resin is come back in probably four or five hours do your squiggles you know like this if you wanted to actually have them set in the in the resin to dry if you've got a faster cure resin like a one inch thick pore resin you could probably wait maybe an hour half an hour an hour and then do that and come back and like do this if you want to have the cool kind of lines and pearl effect in here so as you can see sometimes been gone by and the swirls are all gone just because of the reaction and the setting process so that's where you come back typically after a couple of hours could be up to four or five hours if it's a slow curing epoxy you don't have to do this this is more like i guess visual or artistic preference i think it just looks a little bit better with them some texture in there versus the you know to bring out the pearl instead of just a plain color and then again you know in about half an hour or so you're going to go over with the torch to pop any bubbles and you're going to continue that process the bubble popping process as they come up you don't need to sit there and watch it but you know you really need to pop those bubbles until it actually sets the other cool thing about the silicone molds is silicone as you know is heat resistant so i mean i can sit this here and do that to the mold without any issues it's not going to melt the mold it's not going to catch fire like a wood mold or a uh hdp mold which can melt because it's a thermo what was it plastic two and a half days have passed and the epoxy is now set remember this was a slow cure epoxy because of the thickness of this board so it took a little bit longer than your typical 24 hour period for the initial cure so roughly like i said two and a half days have passed and now the time to demold our project and this is obviously where the silicone molds except so what i'm going to do is just take our weights off shift this over here so you can see the camera and that was basically no effort as you can see super flexible stays clean in there and we have our board now one thing i want to point out which i'm actually kind of glad happened is a couple of days ago when i did pour this um i had to run out and run some errands and then i didn't get back to the shop so i did the initial um you know heat gun application to get rid of the bubbles after about an hour but then i left it and of course once it's set a little bit more you can see there's some bubbles in there really close shut there so these bubbles um you know like i said this is not a desirable effect but we can actually get rid of those by planing those bubbles are you know uh 16th maybe at most an eight inch below the surface uh starting below surface so once you plane that down we can get rid of that and you won't even see it in the finished project but anyway that is the key advantage for these molds and again you can go to boardmolds.com to grab one of these we've got them in 1224 18x9 uh the typical popular sizes um but we're going to continue to finish this board so we are next going to run it through our planer then we'll rotor it sand it and oil it [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] now [Music] [Music] all right the garments for the planer a few times on both sides to get it nice and level we've probably taken off uh anywhere between a quarter inch and three eighths from the entire uh sweet speed inch and a half um a little less than shaft when we poured it so uh it's probably about an inch and an eighth now and uh yeah so there you go you can see that it's completely flat the wood is completely flat and level with the epoxy and that's the entire point of planer so now what we can do here is uh trim it up you can see that we probably don't want that in the final piece this section and we're also going to trim the edges and once that's done we can rotor it uh if you want if you're rubbing it is optional uh routering it would be to round the edges around the sides which i personally like to do i like to look at some people like a nice flush 90 degree look but once it's routed once it's trimmed routed we can sand sand sand and then oil and it'll be done [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so our board is ready for sanding sanding is the least fun part of this job uh as any woodworker knows sanding is just not fun at all now sanding i also find with with resin and these security boards seems to be like there's a lot of different opinions um some people will start at 80 and like work their way up to like 800 or a thousand or even i've seen guys that'll do 2000 to make that board like like glass um that's fine if you want to put that much effort into it however here's what i've found a lot of the finishes like say rubio monaco which you can wouldn't necessarily use on a security board but like wall or soil for example um anything past 180 or 220 grit uh the oil doesn't absorb into the wood it's so smooth and you don't have the open pores anymore that the oil doesn't absorb properly so if you're going to go sand the board to 800 or a thousand that's fine it'll look awesome before you oil it and you can oil it but you're not going to get the deep penetration of that oil that finished so because of that and also just because of time and energy um i usually start at 120 and then go to either 220 or 320. um so i'm going to do this one to 220 so you can see and why do i start 120. so what i've found in the past it might just be this resin and it might be the fact that i've got this type of regular orbital orbital sander instead of something like a festool sander but when i use the 80 and start with that i always end up with scratches and grooves circular grooves uh marks in the in the epoxy so i found when i started at 120 it's less porous it takes time for that initial longer for the initial sand um but i don't see the the marks nearly as much if at all so i don't use 80 um when i'm doing these boards i'm going to do 120 i'm going to do 120 180 and 220 and uh we'll go from there [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so after 20 minutes or half an hour of sanding you're going to end up with the board like this fairly smooth still a little bit matte looking around the epoxy but the oil finish that you're going to add is going to really make that pop the one thing i wanted to mention is especially if you have bubbles in the epoxy when you have little pin holes that's usually caused by a bubble you sand it down and it's exposed a little bit of a divot so there's a couple here uh it's obviously not going to see the camera there's a couple small little pinholes here and normally what you would do at this point after standing find those spin holes is you'd mix a tiny little bit of epoxy pour it in there let it settle and then come back and sand it again um for the case of this video the explanation is probably sufficient that you could do that if you want to um but just to get this video done and move on to the finishing phase of oiling um i'm going to skip throwing those those tiny little pinholes um so you're going to want to take a tack cloth or just a very mildly damp uh towel a lint-free towel and just wipe any sort of excess sawdust off here and once that's done you can do a fun part which is applying the final finish so you can see what your board's gonna look like and we use uh walrus oil not actually made from walruses but it's a mix of coconut oil vitamin e uh pure mineral oil beeswax a bunch of fun stuff but it's a really popular product amongst woodworkers um there's also other board butters and other oils you can get from amazon and another wood supply stores but for the sake of this video we're gonna use walrus oil this is always a fun part just throw it on there and you don't need a lot um i actually have a vat of walrus oil here in the shop that i just pour everything into and i can just kind of reuse the oil uh but the sake of this video i'm just showing you how you would normally do it at home or at a small shop just applying the oil and then just working it into the board use a paint brush for this or you could use cloth or if you want to just use your hands and put a rubber glove on that works as well the key is it doesn't have to be perfect because really what you're doing is you're just applying the oil and then it's going to let it sit and absorb there every oil is different i think walrus oil without any instructions on there but uh i think it's like you know wipe the initial stuff off after an hour and then basically within uh 24 hours it's kind of cured and dried and ready to use you can see really how this the color of that ambrosia maple pops it's like a way way more yellow now and you can see that the texture of those swirls we put into the epoxy the other side you want to low on this stuff you have to work more you can also maybe see here some of the couple of little pinholes that we could have we could have filled with more epoxy before doing this again depends on your level of perfection if you're making these for people and they're paying a heck of a lot of money for them then you'll probably want to make them as perfect as possible if you're making it for yourself or your wife or your husband or whatever you want uh whatever you're doing then you could probably get away with a couple of pinholes and not having to worry about that [Music] all right so normally what you would do is you let it sit for like roughly an hour maybe half an hour and let that oil soak in there and then come back and rub it off this brings us to the end of our video on how to make a resident wood shakuri board like this so we started with a raw live edge piece of ambrosia maple and we now have a finished product that we can either use or sell and i think the big takeaway from this obviously we're biased but is to invest in a good mold uh we sell uh silicone board molds which are commercial grade you know production capacity molds super thick and this is a 24x12 that we use for this board but we also have them in 18 by nine and we've got some other sizes coming out as well um you can also buy an hdpe mold or you can make your own hdpe mold um if you watch one of our other videos we went through how to make a wooden duct tape mold i really only recommend that if you're building you know a couple of these a year if you're going to be doing this as a business or even like a high-end hobby where you're going to be selling them or making them for your friends and family and you and you have a fixed size in mind you know like a common size 24 12 18 9 20 10 whatever it may be invest in a mold because you're going to save so much time and it's going to pay for itself you know after four or five boards anyway hope you enjoyed this video please hit subscribe on this youtube channel if you're watching on youtube and happy making

Channel: Crafted Elements

Views: 33,059

Rating: 4.8998437 out of 5

Keywords: epoxy resin, diy, how to make, charcuterie board, serving board, epoxy resin cutting board, resin board, hdpe, silicone mold, river table, epoxy table, epoxy mold, live edge, woodworking, cutting board, large mold, handmade, how to make a cutting board, resin cutting board, cheese board, serving tray, resin art, epoxy art, how to make resin cutting boards, makers mold, makers reusable mold, exotherm designs, exotherm mold, hdpe form, silicone, form, mold

Id: adCJXD92ss8

Length: 35min 35sec (2135 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020