How to pour epoxy on a barnwood table and get a satin finish PART 1

okay in this video I'm going to walk you through how I put epoxy on barn wood tables when we're dealing with barn wood tables there's usually one of two ways that I finished one is just normal to normally to put polyurethane on or some type of wax and in some cases I suggest that customers use epoxy epoxy has a number of characteristics that really come in handy for places where durability is really something you're going for so the epoxy that you lay down you end up with like 40 or 50 or 60 layers of polyurethane that's really thick and if the cab cable is damaged like in a restaurant setting or a setting where you've got lots of kids that like to stab their forks and knives into the table the epoxy is a whole lot easier to repair than going down and repairing the wood and fixing the stains and stuff like that so one of the things to be aware of to start off with is that because barn wood is so porous and so cracked and has so many holes this epoxy when you go put it on sinks down into everything and it's not like putting epoxy on top of metal or on top of wood that's already pre finished that has no holes and cracks in it so you're going to end up with a lot of air bubbles and a lot of issues and that could cause a lot of problems when you just try and do a flood coat all at once so I always do it in multiple stages somewhere between two and three stages depending on how the wood goes so this is a tabletop that I worked on I have a video of how we went through and did this this is a square table that we did grab an edge cut rabbet cuts around the whole outside and we've got plywood on the inside but the implants on the top we've got the rabbet cuts on the outside that gives me some really nice live-edge barnwood on the outside and a solid wood looking table one of the benefits of that is now because ivory saw on all this wood and I have the thin planks and the plywood underneath I've really limited the amount or the volume that these cavities in the boards where the holes are will take in terms of the wood when you have full two by fours or two by sixes or two by eights or anything bigger than that you really don't know how much epoxy those those cracks are going to take and as a result you might have to do several layers of epoxy and you might spend a whole lot more money on epoxy because you're just filling those voids then it's nice it's going down and stabilizing but in this case we're really limiting the amount that it can do that the only uncertainty is in that quarter-inch of veneer that I have and even then because we've seen the bottom side and we can see the top side we're going to use way less epoxy and have way way less issue to deal with so the first step on this one is I'm going to rough sand the whole thing get it all nice and flat and obviously it exposes some of the barnwood character or amplify the barnwood character then I'm gonna flood coat the whole thing with the black stuff like I always do I won't go over that in detail this time in quite a few of the videos I've already done you can go back and review that then I'm going to put a stain on this one because they want some color on it or I want some color on it before it goes to tradeshow and then we're gonna put the first coat of epoxy on so I'll get to work doing that and then we'll get onto the epoxy okay the wood wise patch driller is on it's dry I've got a link in the description down below if you want to use this stuff super handy for leveling out all your cracks and saw marks and anything that's low plugging any holes prior to putting our stain in our epoxy finish on I know what you're all thinkin dusting what's up with the super cool black and black and red globe you got on you trying to be like Michael Jackson or what no I hurt my finger and I'm trying to cover it up so but I'm not anyways 150 grit sandpaper we're going to smooth this down nice and even you okay now it's time to mix and pour some epoxy this time I'm using East Coast resin this tabletop epoxy hardener I got this stuff off of Amazon I'll put a link in the description down below so you can grab some too if you want or get any other epoxy I've tried quite a few of them some of them are a little bit more fickle than others and they're all kind of weird to work with they're sloppy and messy and temperamental and fickle but they they do have some really good characteristics so it's kind of worth dealing with all that the class they have to go through first thing that we want to do is we're into a seal coat and then we do a flood code afterwards especially with barn wood because it's so porous and there's so many holes and cracks and stuff to fill and even though I flood coated this with the black filler and I've sanded it all off they're still you know might be a little pinhole here or there and this stuff will just leak down inside of it and so rarely have I been able to get a good finish on the on by just one coat so I do a seal coat which either I just scrape on or a brush on that goes in and sets and then I'll come back into a flood coat afterwards sometimes there's been occasions where there's been a void and a little hole and a lot of the epoxy has gone down into it and I'll come and just fill that one then sand that and then do the flood code afterwards the things you really want to pay attention for a vessel are a port in the part of it so these most of them are a 1 to 1 ratio so you really want to make sure you mix them 1 to 1 they are if they are very picky when it comes to that type of stuff so I've got these buckets that that have the measurements on the side and I kind of hold the bottles up to each other to just for an extra thing is to see where you know how they are in relation to each other just in case the bucket was a little weird or something like that and then these ones they the manufacturers every one that I've used all have different like recommendations some of them say mix for one man and then just mix for two mixed or two and then put it in a bucket and another bucket and two minutes something's 677 or something something I can't talk what what I look for is when you mix the two together they start to look a little cloudy and sort of stringy and sometimes silvery I just keep mixing until it's clear like that's how you know that it's that it's mixed so that might be a few minutes or it might be more another thing you want to do is as you're mixing make sure like I use a pretty big stick but I make sure it's clean it's got nothing on it and make sure that you scrape the sides of it off and then and then periodically make sure you're scraping off the very edge of the bucket all the way around and I use like nice sharp edges on the corners and a flat bucket so when I go on mix I pull everything off the corners and I make sure to pull it off the bottom too because the stuff gets like you don't get sticky anything unmixed won't cure it'll be tacky and sticky and you'll have one spot in the one part of your table that hasn't set up and you got to cut it out afterwards and refill it so this is probably the most important step accurate measurement and really thorough mixing and you can see like I'm not even using a timer I'm just gonna keep mixing until I hold this stuff up and it's not cloudy at all it's just clear and I can see right through the bottom you can use for big pores like a drill with a mixer on the end just be very careful not to whip it like with whipped cream you know what happens is you put a ton of bubbles into it and you're gonna get some bubbles no matter what when you're mixing but when you wick it it just makes billions of tiny little bubbles and those are almost impossible to get out afterwards especially if you've got it's like a thicker port so for for this first especially this is kind of a smaller table and for this first port I'm gonna do it by him you can see I'm trying to get all the way around the edges here I'm gonna I mean I might give this three or four or five times throughout the deal scrape off the edge and keep mixing don't again don't whip it you know like try try and limit the amount of air that's getting inside of this one of these days I want to build or buy like a I don't know what the callin like a decompression or a vacuum chamber and you can set this in the vacuum chamber afterwards and it sucks all the air out and then you have zero bubbles in it whatsoever I just haven't got around to it yet and so I use a torch so now it's starting to look really good I'm just going to keep going to be safe even in the plastic you I've used a brush before just make sure it's a brush where the bristles don't fall out that much where you get bristles stuck in your epoxy you can use a plastic one or a metal one as well I'm gonna pour in the middle of the table and then I sort of like it's it's self leveling and so you you pour it on and kind of let it do its own thing I'll start in the middle and then sort of help it spread out and then around the edges that's one of the reasons I wear these gloves as well is as it gets to the edge i I used my hand to push it over the edge and sort of rub it in and push it into any cracks that may be on the outside and then just let it let it level let it let it do its thing I check this to make sure that the table itself is level where it's sitting right now I've put some it's brown paper underneath so it'll catch any of the the epoxy it drips over the edge and it is gonna make a mess it is gonna drip over the edge is gonna cause a little bit of a mess so if you're doing this inside on a prebuilt unit and stuff like that make sure you you know tarp everything off or put plastic on the floor after we've got it on and it's been dripping for a while I'll use my glove and come along and sort of rub off some of the little drips that are forming on the edge on the bottom side and if you catch about the right time you can actually come with a knife after and cut those off before it fully cures or just flip it over when it's done and sand them down depending on when you catch it or not so I'm just making sure there's no dirt and dust on here this actually way more than I need for this first seal coat but it's on now okay now I'm just gonna kind of like do the best I can you can see this is laid down in the middle and I'm just going to kind of help but you can sort of see it like making its way out and I'm just gonna try and help it a little bit to work its way to the outside this first seal coat is just like it's just going on to make sure that all the cracks and holes were filled and that the epoxy isn't trying to escape somewhere you can see I'm good on these ridges so I'm just gonna kind of go over back and forth and try and level out give it a little bit of a help level out any of those ridges that I left as I was doing that so now from there it's pretty much gonna do its job of leveling by itself and all I need to do now is go around these edges so I'm going to use my glove I'm just gonna come around the edge and kind of steal some off the side and rub it along a lot of layers Laurie a lot kind of dripping over the side so you really only need to grab some and push it into the sides where there's not stuff dripping over already now there's some air bubbles in this from when I was mixing it and there's some air bubbles forming from where the epoxy is going down into whatever hole there is and it's replacing that hole the air in that hole with epoxy and it's pushing the air back out and so bubbles are starting to come to the surface we're gonna let this set just for a second here let it kind of level out a little bit so let this kind of level out let some bubbles kind of come out a little bit and then do the torch a little bit on it like I say we'll let it sit for a second let it kind of level out and then we'll pop some of these bubbles should it be too many if you don't do the step with the black filler and there's usually a lot more bubbles and a lot more voice to fill and issues you have so that's what this seal coat becomes way more important in that scenario okay now to pop these bubbles I'm gonna use this torch this propane torch you can use a hairdryer you can use a heat gun and you can even breathe on it yourself those ones though we're kind of move air around and if there's dust in your shop then you're kind of blowing the dust around and so the flame is is does the job it seems without without you know disturbing dust or blowing stuff around and you like that and and we're not trying to heat the epoxy we're like six to ten inches above and I'm not a scientist but from what I understand what you're trying to do is create a deficit of oxygen in the area above the bubble and because the bubble the oxygen to carbon dioxide ratio inside the bubble wants to be equal to that outside the bubble that's what pops the bubble is just that idea of trying to equalize pressure on both sides so you're burning oxygen to make the bubbles on Apollo and you're not going on on top of it so I don't even know if you can see in the camera the bubbles that are popping but this is really all this is really all we're doing it's just kind of passing over it and hopefully you guys can see the bigger the void is that the epoxy is trying to get into the more the more bubbles will come out of it and they'll come out of it just for quite a while like for the next half hour or so so I always will do this at a time you see the end of the day and then I can let it set up overnight but I can sit and watch it for a while until until I'm happy with it it's kind of like concrete in that way where it sort of tells you how long to work so yeah that is basically how we start off the first part of the epoxy port is this nice seal coat and I'll just keep an eye on it and I can see even right now how some of the little cracks in this wood are taking some more of the epoxy than other spots but because it's sort of still in its self leveling phase as the epoxy goes down into those holes more epoxy from around is kind of trying to fill and depending on how deep that crevice is it allowed to get to a point where it continues to fill them and the epoxy sets up and you've got a little a little divot there which is why we come back and do the flood coat the next time and then we know we have a perfect flat surface so not too complex there's just a few things you've got to pay a really close attention to to make sure you've got your mixture right and the the ratio right in the mixing right and then it's got a lot of positive characteristics that are good for areas where you need to derma cable so next thing we'll do is come back and sand this and then come back and sand it and put one more flood coat on and then because it's so glossy and I don't like the glossy furniture for the reclaim type of stuff that I do ice and all the gloss off and then I actually put a satin polyurethane on top and that way we get a satin finish but we get the benefits of the durability of the epoxy okay really quick I've been here about half an hour now just watching for bubbles and blowing them all out with the torch and it's levelled out really nice it's looking really good there's a few spots and this is kind of normal where there's a couple cracks and stuff like that where it's soaking up kind of more than there is in the available area around but that's totally fine that's what this that's what this first seal coats for is to find some of those to get most of it kind of all plugged off real nice and then when we come back and sand and pour our next coat we know where we can give a little bit of extra attention in detail and make sure that they're nice and filled up and then our next coat should go on nice and smooth

Channel: The Dusty Lumber Co

Views: 76,445

Keywords: woodworking, woodwork, epoxy, barnwood, barnwood table, barn wood, barnboard, barnboard table, epoxy pour, epoxy table, wood table, how to, diy woodwork, how to pour epoxy on barnwood

Id: RDY2tNOpsR8

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 27 2019