How to make Wood & Epoxy Coasters

welcome to green and steel everybody today we're going to be making some beautiful epoxy and wood coasters now the very first thing we need to do is we need to make sure we clean up all that bark off of that wood so I crack out the Dremel for this and I use the little sanding disc and this takes quite a bit of time so just be patient when you're doing this now the reason that we do this step is so that the wood and the epoxy can bond together properly now if you don't take this step and you don't clean up your wood very well then your coasters just might not have as long of a lifespan as they could have once all the woods all cleaned up I like to place all the pieces on a sheet of melamine just to kind of visualize what the coasters are going to look like so the next step would be to figure out how big of a mold you need to make now that greatly depends on how big your coasters are actually going to be so my coasters for example are going to be 4x4 which means that my mold has to be a multiple of four inches by four inches then once you've figured out that then you would want to add about a half an inch or an inch or so so that you can cut off the dirty edges once you take the epoxy sheet out of the mold now once I've made all the appropriate cuts that I needed to I start assembling the mold and I just use some cabinet screws for this then once it's all assembled I just grab the silicone and I start sealing up all those Corners so that there are no leaks when I finally pour my epoxy so make sure you really take your time with this and you cover every single crack that you possibly can because leaks are not fun at all to deal with so please do yourselves a favor and take your time here now once our silicone is finally cured we're first going to come back with our mold relief spray and then we're going to spread it nice and evenly with a little brush now the next step is to make sure that your wood stays in place and it doesn't float on your epoxy pore so the way I did that is I made a small batch of epoxy and I spread it nice and thin right on the bottom and then I set my wood pieces inside of the epoxy and let that cure now this is actually a part of the project where you really decide what your coasters are going to look like so take your time when you set this up now that the epoxy has finally cured and the wood is stuck in place I'm going to come back with some sandpaper and I'm going to scuff up that epoxy really well that way it bonds to the main epoxy pour so now that everything's all scuffed up I'm finally ready for my main pour so for these coasters I went with a misty white look because I wanted them to almost be transparent so I made sure not to use too much white pigment so the first mistake I made here in this project is that I started swirling this black into the epoxy way too soon I should have waited another two or three hours typically you want to wait about 12 to 13 hours before you start swirling so what ended up happening was it ended up dissipating and I had to re-swirl a couple hours later so here we are about four or five days later the epoxy has finally cured and it's ready to be taken out of the mold now as I'm taking it out of the mold I'm already noticing that it's really really thin and I'm not sure that I can even plane it down to the proper thickness without it being way too flimsy but I decided to go ahead and start planning it anyways and lo and behold the coasters were Way Too Thin so I had to scrap this entire batch and restart so here I am after I finally did everything the right way this time and the sheet is nice and thick and it can be planed down to a half inch the right way so as you can see here with this batch I made this mold a little bit narrower and a lot longer that way I can just run it through the planer instead of using the router sled which is a huge pain in the butt now the planer obviously made very quick work of this sheet which I was super grateful for and I also on the last few passes I made sure to keep the planer on finishing mode so that it was a little bit smoother and I didn't have to sand quite as much now here I am sanding to get all those planar marks off and this process again does take a very very long time so just be patient here now once I've sanded the planer marks off I come back with some CA glue and I fill any imperfections that I see and then I sand it back down so it's smooth again it's at this stage that I'm finally ready to cut this big sheet into individual coasters so the very first thing I do is I cut the very edge off of each side so now that the sheet has clean edges to run up against the fence I will set my table saw to four inches which is the size of the coasters that I want and I go ahead and cut the sheet into four inch strips next I'll go ahead and turn the strips horizontally and I make sure to be really careful here because this is kind of sketchy and I go ahead and I cut them into four inch squares so another tedious but I think essential part of this project is to make sure that your edges look super professional so the way I did that is I used the Disc Sander and I cleaned up all those edges one by one now after hours of grueling sanding it's finally time to put the finish on the moment I've been waiting for the moment you all have been waiting for so once I've cleaned up all the coasters with some isopropyl alcohol I'll crack out the Eau days oil and a white pad and I just start rubbing it into them one by one now keep in mind you really don't need that much odie's oil a little bit goes a long way after about an hour of letting the Odis oil sit on all those coasters I come back with a little towel and I wipe off all the excess and what they say is that you can never wipe off too much but you can leave too much on so make sure you're very thorough when you wipe it off so this next step isn't really essential if you're just making these for yourself or for friends or family but if you are packaging these and shipping these to customers I do think it's really important to make sure your packaging looks presentable so the way I did this is I just took some twine and I basically just wrapped it around a set just like I would wrap some string around a present for Christmas and now for the grand reveal here's what the final product looked like so they did sell out very quickly but I did make a much larger batch and I did end up making black coasters with white swirls as well and they looked very cool as you can see here so if you are interested in purchasing a set of white or black coasters go ahead and hit the link to my Etsy in the description I hope you guys all learned something or just enjoyed this video in general and if you did don't forget to leave a thumbs up and a comment I'd really appreciate it and do subscribe if you would like to see more videos like this

Channel: Grain & Steel

Views: 5,812

Keywords: wood, epoxy, how to, woodworking, juniper, grain and steel, building, build, DIY, do it yourself, coasters

Id: 7_9l9Go2JZM

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023