How to Safely Use a Pressure Pot - Resin Casting Tips

welcome back to the shop this is zach at envy woodworks so today i'm going to be covering the two things that you need to avoid doing to make sure that you stay safe when using pressure pots for resin casting so let's get started so first off for anybody that doesn't exactly know what a pressure pot is you might have just got started and heard about pressure pots and heard that you can you know get rid of air bubbles using a pressure pot first things first they are not pressure cookers pressure cookers are meant to be used for cooking not not for resin casting they're not safe what we use for resin casting is something like this it is a converted paint spraying tank so initially these were you know the product itself was meant to be you know pressurized you put paint in it and there's a pickup tube and you would be able to you know walk around spraying paint whether it may be for like automotive purposes or maybe inside like a residential building or commercial building paint spraying basically now what we do is we remove everything that would be associated with taking a fluid and spraying it out of the tank all we're doing is locking down this tank pressurizing it and you know we put our casting inside and that pressure what that does is it shrinks the air bubbles to the point where they're not lo they're no longer basically there they're microscopic and then once the the liquid turns to a solid they're effectively gone so all we're doing is pressurizing it once it's ready we take it out now to use to operate a pressure pot this is another subject that people ask me about and you know it's really simple if you've been doing this for a while and it seems maybe pretty obvious but basically what you would do is i'm going to take the lid off here and what i would do is i would pour my resin into a mold put the mold in the pressure pot first put your lid on i recommend doing two opposite screws at the same time that way you're you're putting even pressure down so tighten them down a little bit as you go opposite screws both at the same time get it nice and tight and then at this point you make sure all the exhaust valves are closed and then you would take a compressed air this would be hooked to a compressor and you fill the tank now on top of this you have a regulator that once you've set it it will stop filling at the level that you've set it to you have a gauge that tells you what the psi that's pounds per square inch is and once you're done you're going to close your ball valve off remove that air and it's going to be you know holding air now when you're casting is ready what you're going to do is you're going to crack one of the release valves and i would recommend letting it just slowly you know evacuate the air you don't want to just blow it open all at once um that pressure change can can change temperatures and stuff so let it just slowly leak out once it's totally down to zero on the gauge then all you got to do is unscrew the top put your lid somewhere safe and you would take out your casting all right so it seems you know most of you guys probably know how this works you've seen people do it but sometimes if you're you know using something that you're not familiar with you just don't know what the steps are so i just wanted to kind of cover that real quick all right so now that we've identified what the pressure pot is and how you operate it let's dive in and kind of look at what is the the concern what is the safety issue with these things so once you've you know clamped your lid down and and you've you know attached your air hose you've pressurized the tank what's happening is the air molecules in there are exerting pressure in every direction inside this and so what could happen is if any of the components on the lid fail it can blow the lid off kind of effectively turn into a bomb so how do we stay away from that well all of the pressure pots that are out there that are worth using if yours does not have this then i would take it back and go get one that is is a good quality pressure pot but every pressure pot is going to tell you exactly what the maximum psi is that the pressure pot can handle you do not want to go above that max psi that is the the one the golden rule with pressure pots as long as you're staying within the working limits of the pressure pot that you bought then you should be fine i do know of a couple people that have had lids blow off on them but those people were exceeding the psi and you know i know other people that have been doing this even longer than i have and they know of people the only cases that i know of from anybody that i've even talked to is a case where they exceeded the the max psi on their pressure pot so you know just like any other tool in the shop if you're abusing it if you're if you're taking it beyond what it's capable of doing of course you can run into dangerous issues however if you're using it the way that it was meant to then you should be fine okay so the other thing that there's kind of a two-rule thing with this so that is the number one rule and this kind of just is support for that the other thing that you need to do is do not remove any of the safety features on your pot there are three of them you have a safety relief valve this is by far the most important if for some reason your regulator wasn't set right or you weren't paying attention or something happened weird when you're pressurizing it and it ended up going above what you wanted it to what it should be you know the max the safety relief valve will automatically open to relieve the pressure so that it doesn't go above the max that's what it does so that is a very important piece i also would argue that the regulators the secondary it's kind of a nice little backup piece of safety equipment plus it's just convenient what the regulator does is you set it so that when you attach your air hose literally i can just walk away and once this is set to the right psi it will stop letting air in you know for me in this case i have it set to 70 psi i can put on my air hose walk away and it will stop inflating the tank at 70 psi that's just convenience okay that's why i like it in in my shop it's not like i just have a compressor that only you know all it you is used for is pressurizing pressure pots we have a tank i share a shop with my dad we've got all kinds of different tools that require air and in a range of different psi levels that they work with these are 70 psi but we have things that that work better at 100 psi so we set our tank regulator our air compressor regulator at about 120 and then you regulate at the tool that you're using that way these don't ever change the compressor doesn't change you don't have to be adjusting things so it's a convenience factor and i just think it's better to regulate at the pressure pot now people will argue that this is a you know keeping the regulator on is a point where you could get a leak and my argument back is so just fix the leak if there is one it's not really that hard to find in fixed leaks i have a video on how to do that now the third piece of equipment that you do not want to remove is the gauge that way you know what you know what psi level your tank is at so that's kind of a no-brainer and that's for two reasons obviously you don't want to over pressurize the tank that's a safety concern but the other thing is you want to know if your you know pressure if you have leaks it'll tell you if it's dropping pressure so those three things i would argue keep them on at all times and of course what they're trying to do is do not exceed the working pressure now the other thing is if you have a pressure pot that you don't know what the max psi is it doesn't stay anywhere i would return it or just get rid of it dude don't use it go get one that you know exactly what you're dealing with and if it is a if you know the manufacturer but it's not listed on the pot itself maybe you can contact the manufacturer if you have like a serial number and just find out what is the max you know you want to know that so again very simple these are not things that you need to be very scared of i mean there are a lot of tools in my shop that i am a lot more afraid of than these pressure pots but i will say the first time that i used them i was afraid too i i literally i had a ball valve like 10 feet away and i'm ducking and doing all this stuff because it was an unfamiliar thing and i'd heard horror stories but the reality is as long as you're not abusing the tool follow the the manufacturer's guidelines don't exceed the max psi there's really nothing to be worried about so hopefully this was helpful if this helped you out hit that like button down below uh this is your first time on my channel we do all kinds of resin casting projects tips and tricks and experiments around here so if you're interested in that kind of stuff definitely hit that subscribe button and hit that notification bell so you get notified when new videos get posted as well as when i go live we do live streams on wednesdays doing resin casting uh and i also have another uh like i have a whole playlist on pressure pots uh one of them that i think is really well two two that are really good that you should probably watch if you're going to be setting up a pressure pod i have one that shows you how to find and fix leaks i think that's important it can happen even on brand new ones you know it's very simple to find them and fix them the other one is choosing a pressure pot i'm not going to go into that on this video i have one that kind of outlines you know there's different features and what to think about so anyway those videos are available i got them linked down below and on the screen here so the other last thing is if you're just getting into resin casting and you're really not sure where to begin check out my ebook the beginner's guide to resin casting it answers all those beginner questions like what do i need to get started you know how does resin work it'll help you get over that initial learning curve so you can get in the shop and start making some resin cast projects of your own it's available on my website if you're interested so until next time guys thanks for watching this video and happy casting

Channel: Zac Higgins

Views: 47,120

Keywords: Resin Casting, Alumilite, Polyurethane Resin, PR, Polyester Resin, Epoxy, Pen Blanks, Wood Turning, NV Woodwerks, Pressure Pot, Vacuum Chamber, Pen Turning, Resin Art, zac higgins, epoxy casting, how to, casting resin, pressure pot for resin casting, resin casting under pressure, resin casting for beginners, resin casting tips, pressure casting, pressure pot explosion, epoxy resin, casting pen blanks, pressure casting resin, pressure casting pot, alumilite resin

Id: ooRB9CbqD-U

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021