epoxy resin

 development of new techniques.

There has been much interest in the woodwork community in the use of resin in projects. From personal experience making house signs, it is difficult to make lettering stand out. Painting, gold leaf or back filling with wax are all methods I have used.

River tables using live edge boards with a resin infill seem to be very popular along with many smaller projects where coloured resin is included in the design.

Not wishing to be left out I thought it was time I had a try. I had been experimenting with a Trend letter template on chopping boards, so designed  a tapas board and antipasti board.

The first attempt involved using coloured wax and clear resin. The resin did not stick to the wax and soon became discoloured. Further attempts followed using dye in the resin to create the colour, but inaccuracy in weighing out the resin and hardener lead to further failures.

 

 

 

 

 

 Success

Having experienced several quite expensive failures, I finally managed to get a couple of boards to work.

Lettering as before was done using the Trend letter template, but the resin was made as a larger single quantity then split down and coloured as required, thus minimising errors due to the inacuracy of the kitchen scales I was using.

The tapas board was coloured red, yellow, red to represent the spanish flag and the antipasti board red, white, green to represent the Italian flag. More practice is needed but I feel progress has been made.

In a further development I had some offcuts from cheeseboards which I turned in to Christmas decorations. Small tree shapes with holes filled with resin which look very effective when back lit. I have also joined an epoxy users facebook group to learn from other users of this interesting material.