Scraping resin

Desk ShelfResinWoodworking

I don’t know why I had it in my head that you couldn’t scrape resin and you had to sand it, but I did. And it’s not a great approach. I poured a little extra over the last day’s resin pour to get it proud of the surface, and ran both packing tape and a hot glue dam around the edge to let it get proud without spilling all over the place.  

Pour, let it cure, remove hot glue with ease, curse and swear for half an hour or more while removing the packing tape because it doesn’t want to remove cleanly. Scrape with the plastic razor blades to get the last of it up. 

Total pain. Worse yet, you get a perfect surface when you pour it but you know you’ll have to destroy that to get a single flat plane for the tabletop 🙁

Oh well. … Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 3 Comments

Pouring the sea

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Woodworking

So the next step was to even out the bottom of the sea a bit with the router. That took about five minutes and was mostly making light cuts here and there rather than any systematic grid pattern thing. 

Then time to seal the grain; I don’t really want the resin leeching out through the grain. I mean, it’s walnut, it’s not very porous but still. 

This stuff isn’t wood filler, that kind of putty I use to cover my mistakes, this is much much finer grain material that is supposed to get into the pores and block them up. It’s a pretty thick mix in the tin, almost at a putty consistency, but you dilute it to a thin slurry with white spirit and then rub that into the wood with a rag, and clean it off when you’ve gotten as much in as will go.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

Adding the sea

Desk ShelfResinWoodworking

So when the client for the desk likes racing cars and the Titanic, what do you do? You inlay a racetrack with stringing and banding and you add in a piece of the north Atlantic using resin 😀 
Step one: that router base will not let you get an even depth across that wide a hole, so unscrew it (mangling a screw in the process and having to use a left-hand screw removal bit to dig it out) and add on a much wider shop-made wooden base:

I’m willing to bet nobody else is dumb enough to use sapele for something like this (especially since plywood would be a better, flatter choice). 

Step two: strap on the respirator, the goggles, the ear defenders and make sure you’re good and uncomfortable from all the PPE even before you turn on the dust collector and the router and grit your teeth against the entire process and cut down about 8mm into walnut over a good third of the surface area of the desk, staying within the lines.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments