Melting Epoxy Into Furniture With the Sun

oh it's not holding hey this is cam with Blacktail studio and it takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to the things that I'm building and I can unequivocally say that I have never been more surprised by the outcome of a project than this project here and first off because when I started this project I didn't even know what I was making I first wanted to see if I could mix a few different colors of epoxy and kind of make an ombre effect and I thought that'd be the end of it I thought that would be as cool as it could possibly be for this type of project so what I did is I got my wife enlisted she came out helped me mix helped me find the perfect colors because as I mentioned before I'm colorblind so I got her out there we had a little bit of fun mixing the colors and this apparently was just the start I did not know how far I was going to take this project and honestly I did not think it was going to work whoa Jesus as you can hear my wife is extremely helpful when it comes to choosing this perfect color but I really brought this on myself because I was shocked at the number of paint samples she got for the inside of our house when we painted it so much so that I asked the guy at the paint store I said hey what is the most samples anybody's ever gotten for a room and he goes oh man this one time someone got like 30 samples my wife got 60 samples 60 samples for the inside of a house anyway I digress and we finally got ready for this pour and we opted not to use a tripod for some reason and I'll just let this play out oh it's not holding Jesus it's floating away this alone is very ombre like oh okay this is pretty maybe we should have used the tripod you got it uh-huh all right sorry Jesus that looks hilarious as long as I've been working with wood and epoxy people from The Woodworking Community have been telling me that I am not a real woodworker and that just mixing wood and epoxy does not equal woodworking so finally I am trying to earn the respect my peers and I'm no longer mixing wood and epoxy and this solid epoxy project is the one that I am hoping that they finally recognize my skills and qualify me as a real woodworker foreign I mentioned earlier that the end result of this project really surprised me and that could not be more of an understatement and this part didn't really surprise me I figured I'd be able to mix a few colors together let them blend into mold and it should look pretty cool and it does but the finished product at the end of this video that I didn't even know the direction that this project was going to take at this point in the build was probably the single project that I am most proud of out of everything I've built so much so that instead of selling this in honor of the upcoming 2 million subscribers that I hopefully get to I'm not there yet I'm at like 1.9 as of the time I'm filming this I'm going to be giving this project away to one of you guys and there'll be details in the video description or later in the video so if you're interested in winning this project I will ship this anywhere in the world because most of my viewers come from outside the US so I don't want to limit this to just us viewers so Link in the description or more details later in this video at the end of my last video I asked people to start their question or comment with the bald celebrity they thought that I most closely resembled and I would choose my favorite one and give them a shout out in a future video and we had so many good submissions that I actually have two we have a crowd favorite and a personal favorite and first off the crowd favorite that one comes from complexities and they said that I most closely resemble Johnny Sins and if you do not want to admit where you know Johnny Sins from just play it safe and say that you know Johnny Sins from his YouTube channel and nothing else on the internet however my personal favorite comes from James gym and it was a Japanese saw restoration video and he said that they most closely resembled Mr Sparkle and I'm also partial because I'm a big vintage Simpsons fan so thanks to everybody that gave their submissions and especially to James gym and complexities [Music] if you look through my past videos you'll see that I generally gravitate towards pretty sharp edges I like things like a really sharp 90 degree waterfall Edge or a 22 degree chamfer that I end up putting on most of my tables and so this time I want to do something a little bit different and so I am using this two and a half inch radius bit on my router table and I'm just softening these edges I'm giving them a nice curved radius because the next step that I'm going to take is pretty ridiculous it is something that not only have I never tried before I want to go as bold as to say I don't think anybody on the internet has done this before and I've never said that before because I feel like the internet is too big of a place and everything has already been done so if you can find this anywhere on the internet leave a comment with a link to that and I will post a public retraction because I don't think anybody is stupid enough to try this and I end up risking this thousand dollar chunk of epoxy for something that I didn't even think was going to work but before I could do that I had to build a form and this is just a big box with a solid curved radius which is what I'm doing here at this point I should probably say that I'm building a box just like real Woodworkers do when they want to do those really cool curved bent laminations or steam bending however I don't actually know how to do that and so what I am basing this entire design on is a series of memories that I have where I've seen Instagram clips of people bending wood with either steam or just those bent laminations and hoping that the same thing can possibly apply to trying to bend a big solid brick of epoxy and the reason I want to give this disclaimer is because I don't want anybody who wants to try the real bent laminations or steam bending to copy this design because I'm sure it's the wrong way to do it however there are any real Woodworkers out there that know how to properly build these boxes definitely leave me a comment and let me know how this design can be improved upon because I left plenty of room for improvement and all I'm doing here is just cutting a bunch of two by fours that will act as a support and help me build this giant curved form some of you are probably correctly starting to wonder how exactly does he think he's going to bend this solid brick of epoxy it is fully cured before epoxy is completely cured it tends to be a little bit gummy and a little bit flexible however this has cured for over a year and a half it is rock hard there is zero Flex in it you might think that you could do this if you just poured it and then try to bend it in the first week however you couldn't surface it like I did so I have it perfectly consistent and flat and you wouldn't be able to do that with the kind of gummy epoxy so I don't think you could do it that way and the inspiration behind this idea comes from a friend of mine who is installing an epoxy table and while they were getting the house ready for it they had it sitting out in the sun and in just a few minutes the center of the table started a taco started to Sag from the heat so what I'm doing is I'm going to see if I can do that on purpose I'm going to use the sun to try to heat this up and bend it over this epoxy form or not epoxy form but whatever you call this bent form the first thing I learned though is don't use this hardboard that does not flex and it was a horrible idea to use there so went back got some Thin plywood that I'm going to cut some kerfs in because I also tried to bend this and it did not want to bend either and at this point I did not know if this was going to work but again I was in for a penny in for a pound I'm all in I'm gonna see if I can make this work and it's a pretty big investment at this point between the money of epoxy and the materials and most importantly the time so we don't get a lot of 100 degree days in Oregon and I had a four day stretch we're supposed to be over 100 every single day so this was probably my last opportunity for the year to try this project foreign was pretty inspired by how well cutting those curves in that thin plywood allowed it to bend around this radius and so now I just needed to find a way to attach it as perfect as I possibly could and I knew it wouldn't be hard to get it attached in some fashion however what was going to be really critical was getting it as smooth as I possibly could because unlike bending wood where the wood is going to kind of naturally bend in a radius this epoxy once it heats up it'll allow itself to be dented or kinked or anything like that so if there's any lumps or defects in it that epoxy is going to soak it up so added some glue added some clamps and here's what we got foreign oh this I I think there's a 10 chance of it working but if it does it's cool ten percent yeah I just said I usually have a pretty good idea like when something's a good idea and when it's not this is one of those it doesn't seem like a good idea but try also this pretty shoddy just a little lumpy a little lumpy yep for once the weather was actually cooperating the high today was supposed to be about 104 degrees Fahrenheit which is about 40 degrees Celsius to the rest of the world and that's pretty hot for Western Oregon I know that there's somebody living in Death Valley or Nevada that's going to comment and say that I don't know what it's like to actually be hot and it's true I might not but for us this is pretty warm and so first thing in the morning we got it out there it was as cool as it's going to be we had two cameras rolling so we didn't want to miss anything and I was just winging it I didn't know what was going to happen and then this happened it actually started to bend in the sun that's a time lapse but I was blown away I was so freaking excited that it actually worked and so now I got some ratchet straps out and I was just going to try to help it along and I was shocked at how well this was working I was blown away because it was completely flexible and I could have pushed it probably all the way at that point but I was afraid of cracking it and I had the entire day to go so let that time lapse run it actually got so hot that both of our cameras shut off in the shade but here's how it's looking this is totally gummy and now the only thing I'm worried about is if it's actually going to be consistent and if it gets too hot to crack the epoxy and I did continue to check the temperature of the epoxy which got to about 135 degrees Fahrenheit which I don't know what that is in Celsius I'll probably put it up on the screen but there we go we got it all the way down and this is the next morning laughs here we go never ever thought this would work all right we gotta get out of the sun now [Applause] all right it's been about three days since coming out of the form and initially everything looks really good there's no major creases there's no cracks or anything like that when you look a little closer you start seeing some of the imperfections though there's a little bit of distortion on one side versus the other there's a couple creases where I had the clamps clamped without any towels under them it's a perfect 90 right down the middle but then if you get off just to the sides it's just off of a little bit from a perfect 90s so not terrible for a first attempt but definitely not perfect foreign the simplest way for me to finish this probably would have been just to sand it lightly up to about 180 maybe 240 grit and then spray it with something like a lacquer or a varnish however I just don't think that looks quite as cool as when something is polished all the way up so what I'm going to do is I'm taking it from this 80 grit all the way up to 3000 grit and then I'm going to buff it with Automotive compounds and this will be the worst sanding job of my life and I feel like I probably say that in multiple videos but this is the Undisputed new champion of horrible sanding projects and here I good thing I have about two thousand dollars in Sanders because now I get to use all the little odd ones I have like that little Rotex 90 that actually did a really nice job of getting in the curves there and this bigger Rotex the vertex 150 did a really nice job of kind of smoothing out some of those dimples and dents that I showed you earlier from where the clamps it kind of compressed that epoxy and did a surprising job of smoothing it out I wanted to stick with this theme of using just these soft edges and so I bought this half inch round over bit and it was actually surprisingly hard to find a half inch round over bit for a quarter inch Chuck which is this little trim router I have here you can see why I had to use the trim router because I had to Teeter it on this little edge here I do have larger routers that would have worked better with better dust collection or I should say epoxy collection but this is what I had come up with and this was pretty messy and by the way that new respirator I have there it's pretty freaking cool there's a link in the video description for it if you're interested in it it's one of my favorite respirator purchases of the last probably ever actually and it is really really expensive though so be forewarned that it is not cheap and here's the mess that I made this was just a couple epoxy shavings and we really sped this up because this was a pretty long process to get this whole thing completely rounded over about a year ago I took a pretty big gamble I spent about 30 hours or so creating a script and a step-by-step game plan I hired an outside film crew and we spent about 40 hours or so filming my virtual epoxy workshop and the reason this was a gamble is I probably could have made two or three maybe even four YouTube videos in that amount of time but people were always asking me to bring back my epoxy workshops because I used to do them in person but I had so many people that couldn't fly from across the country or across the world and wanted to have a good resource on how to build a wood and epoxy table so I committed myself to this plan and it was something that I didn't want to miss a single step so there was a lot of work that went into it I even did kind of live sessions when I was filming it with Instagram so I could get live feedback in real time so if there was a question that the audience had that I might not have thought of I could answer that just like I was doing a live class and it's something I'm really proud of and to be honest I was completely blown away by the response I have had so many more people sign up for it than I expected and if you are interested in it you can watch it over and over again you can just watch a single chapter you can re-watch multiple chapters it's just something I am incredibly proud of and if you're interested often I'm writing a promotion so check the link in the description and see if there's a current promotion going on right now I was recently on Tick Tock and I was watching the southern Craftsman and he said hey I know everybody's seen this trick a thousand times but if you don't know how to mark your line here's how to properly do it don't put your square up to the line and then Mark it you put your pen or pencil up to the line and then bring the square directly to that and I'm embarrassed to say I had never seen that trick before which is what you saw me do when I marked this acrylic leg here so thanks to the southern Craftsman for showing me a trick that apparently I should have known years ago in my last video I mentioned that I have an upcoming project that didn't involve any wood whatsoever and spoiler is not actually this project there is still wood to come as part of this project so stay tuned for that but I showed this Quick Clip and I said if anybody can guess what it was I would send them a prize and it ended up being a wood and epoxy cutting board and it only took an hour and a guy by the name of Mr Cody full correctly guessed that I am going to attempt to restore a real-life woolly mammoth tusk and here's a clip of it now and here's a shot of what I hope to make it look like which is not one that I've done before and it's something totally new to me I think it's going to be awesome some people are wildly confused about why anybody would want to attempt this I think it is really really cool and I hope you'll stick with me and I promise I'm not going to Pivot to a fossil Channel or anything like this it's just something that I am personally fascinated with and I can't wait to tackle this woolly mammoth tusk and congrats to Cody on getting the answer correct this is the fun part and it's also the nerve-wracking part because this is when the epoxy really comes alive this is when you polish it up and you can see right through it but you'll also be able to see any sanding imperfections that you made along the way so going all the way from 80 grit up to 3000 grit there's a very good chance that I missed something and once you polish it you'll see these little pigtail Swirls and horrible scratches in there and so far it's looking pretty good this is the extreme heavy cut stuff with a wool buffing pad and it gets a lot shinier than this but so far I'm pretty inspired thinking that it's coming together pretty nicely and it's really starting to look more like blown glass than epoxy which is not something I expected so at this point I'm feeling pretty good I got the stage one out and now it's really starting to buff to a high gloss until Scott pointed this out what's that is that well Scott my video guy just pointed out and thank you for that by the way Scott I have a giant clamp footprint in the middle of this that somehow didn't get sanded out during the entire sanding and polishing process and it's got the perfect microfiber imprint from when it was in the form and the sun my only theory is that when we heat it up during this polishing process it got that plastic memory from when it was clamped in the sun it kind of sprung back into shape I have no idea if that's true if you are a Plastics chemist definitely let me know in the comments because I can't imagine how I would have missed that sanding but now I'm going to sand it down and try to fix it since this entire piece is already essentially fully polished I wanted to be as gentle as possible when it comes to sanding so I only went down to 1500 grit which as it turns out was just aggressive enough to completely remove that stamp now the only question is does it come back when I heat it up in the polishing process what do you think Gonna Come Back [Music] uh I don't know I look like I know what I'm doing I know for sure I know for sure it's got I don't know if it's gonna spring back all right there's nothing part of me is tempted to really push it to see how hot I can get it to see if it comes back the part of me was to go really slow and not get it hot because right now looks good so how curious am I as it turns out I was not quite curious enough to really push the polishing process to see if there actually was something in the chemistry of this table that would cause that plastic memory to spring back if I got it just hot enough so proceeded rather cautiously with the rest of the polishing process and about now I started wonder about a name for this table because it's not really a waterfall table it's not really an epoxy table at least the epoxy table that we normally think of and I asked my friend Chris over at Four Eyes Furniture what he thought I should call it he said that I should call it the Peyronie's table but it doesn't really resemble any type of Russian meat pie so I don't even know what he's getting at there but if you have a suggestion for a name I would love to hear it so any ideas you have I would love it if you left me the suggestions in the comments and if I end up using that as the future name of this table I will definitely give you a shout out in a future video this is a clear piece of acrylic I bought up at TAP plastics and it's actually much nicer than it looks underneath that clear protective wrap they sell them with and this is an idea my wife had she suggested I keep everything very modern very transparent with this clear acrylic and the Clear Blue Table and this piece was actually really really expensive it was like 240 for that one chunk of acrylic which if you know my wife is generally pretty fitting and I was a little nervous though about how I was going to attach it because I didn't think straight epoxy on epoxy was going to be strong enough so I wanted to have a little bit of mechanical force in there too so what I came up with is this Jig Is it fits a bushing for my router just perfectly so that bushing clicks into that jig I have a half inch router bit and as I plunge it down it should leave a perfect half inch hole and the idea here is this will allow me to use some clear acrylic dowels that are also half inch and when I use the same template on my table everything should line up just perfectly and I'll have that kind of mechanical reinforcement I was pretty nervous cutting this small round piece of acrylic because I wasn't certain it wouldn't shatter or shoot back into my face but normal cross cut blades seemed to work well and to make sure I had three dowels the exact same length I used my cat's Moses stop block and now I have three pieces the exact size I need that'll fit perfectly into those holes however when I started looking at that piece and looking at that piece I couldn't bring myself to put my router into that epoxy table so I scrapped the idea of using that acrylic leg and here is the wood leg I'm going to use instead foreign I had an idea for a single Table leg that would really match the style with those kind of soft rounded edges and kind of modern design but I didn't want to use regular boring wood and By Boring wood I just mean wood that I've used a million times before so no Walnut no Maple no anything like that this is a piece of zebra wood actually went down to the Woodcraft just down the street from me and I rifled through everything they had and I got this eight quarter two inch thick piece of zebra wood and it's a really really beautiful wood species and one that I've never used before but pretty excited about it but there's still the question of will a single Table leg actually balance this thing from behind so I have to see if I can pull this off but first just some normal jointing and planing this is actually a jointer I'll be giving away in a local giveaway here pretty soon because I just got a new one from Oliver this is an 8 inch shot Fox One totally decent so stay tuned for details on that jointer giveaway too just like before I nipped the edges off with the bandsaw came over to the router table but this time I believe I used an inch and a half radius bit and I felt that this looked a little bit better since it was a much smaller piece I didn't want to use the same large radius that I used on the table but now is where it gets really interesting because there is very very little room for air with this mounting system that I'm going with but if I pull it off I will not have to put any holes into the table which is my dream so I've got my spots marked I've got a forstner bit in there that is a very specific size and you'll see why it has to be just so perfect in just a little bit I also at this point you don't want to blow out the other side so I have it clamped down which should prevent any blowout I went almost all the way through and then finished it from the other side leaving just that satisfying little disc there foreign I am well aware that most Woodworkers do not have a bandsaw like I have here and if they do have a bandsaw it's probably not as nice as this one which I've only had for a couple of months now but one thing that any woodworker can do is build jigs you can use Jigs and a router to build almost anything make a bunch of sleds for your table saw it is incredible the things that people come up with that enable their table saw to become multi-function tools and if you still need some industrial tools if you still need tools that aren't available through using a jig I actually made a website a few months ago it's called makerbook.io and it's kind of like a uber for tools except for the fact I don't make any money on it I actually lose money having this website but what it does is enables anybody with a small Shop create a listing and they can rent out their shop space their time their tools so if you don't have the tools and you just need to use it for 30 minutes or an hour there's probably someone local to you that'll rent your shop out rent the tool out to you and enable you to woodwork without actually having to make that big upfront investment of the expensive tool also I'll include a link in the description but again it's makerbook.io the finish that I'm using here is a water-based poly which is a really difficult finish to brush on and I actually recently got an HV LP gun but I've just been too nervous to use it so it's still in the box and I'm trying to build up the courage to actually learn how to use it and here this took a few coats and a little bit of sanding in between but it looks really really nice this is how I'm actually going to attach it well I'm not actually going to use adhesive on this to the table but what I'm using here is contact cement and then I have this kind of sticky felt pad and there is adhesive on the felt itself but this contact cement adhesive is really really strong so I thought it would be a little bit more durable and so it took a little bit of wiggle and try not to ruin the finish with that adhesive got it stuck on there and I let it cure for a little while before I came back to trim it up it seems like at this point of any project is always when I get in a hurry and instead of just nice and easily trimming this I run the exacto knife right into the side of the wood and end up having to sand it down and redo it so try to show some restraint because I was so close to finally being done with this project and there's an old build of mine that is currently in our house and here is the staging spot for this video the epoxy looks really really good it's not perfect like I said before however the fit on this is pretty perfect I'm actually really proud of that I think that's pretty cool and I know this isn't for everybody I know it's a unique style I think it's pretty unique I'm really excited about it it's one of the favorite things that I've ever built and I'm giving it away it's open to anybody in the world there's a link in the video description it's not super stable on carpet but it's actually pretty stable on Solid Ground it's really stable okay it's really stable on Solid ground but if you are interested in that there's a link in the video description and oh yeah I even made some custom zebra wood coasters for it so you don't have to damage this finish anyway let me know what you think I'm really really proud of this one every week I like to give a little bit of credit to people who make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with either old or new to let me know whether you prefer the old end table or the new end table as always thank you so much have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 4,617,232

Keywords: diy projects, diy river table, ecopoxy table, epoxy dining table, fgci epoxy, furniture portland oregon, how to make an epoxy table, how to make river table, how to woodworking, liquid glass epoxy, live edge furniture, reclaimed table, resin table top, river table, super clear epoxy, walnut dining table, woodworking, epoxy table, bending epoxy, bending epoxy with heat, blue epoxy table

Id: hCmE2yY8Kvk

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022