For this assignment I was very hesitant to use wood. I'm not very familiar with the power tools and I admit that they make me very nervous. I later decided that at some point I should learn how to do it and that now was as good a time as any so I started playing with the idea of making wooden shot glasses. After looking at several tutorials on YouTube it seemed to me a rather advanced project and a time-consuming one given that we don't have all the tools in the tutorials at the shop.
So I moved on to making wooden coasters as they seemed simpler. In my effort of making a piece less basic I added to my design a resin component that later on turned out to be not such a great idea.
I really liked the look of it but I decided to have my design be a little more geometric because I had already bought wood that was straight and didn't have organic edges like this one. I was unsure of my abilities when it came to shaping the wood so decided no to take risks in that sense.
I cut down the wood to a square that I wanted to place in the center at an angle inside the blue resin and stained the wood as I prefer a darker color for it.
I left the wood thicker than the mold because I thought that once the resin set I could sand it down and re-stain it. By making a trial run I realized that this would be a mistake because the sanding process damaged the resin.
The color of the wood faded a little because the stain wasn't completely dry. I was very thorough in the mixing of the resin which caused many bubbles (even though I used a heat gun to get rid of some) and I also damaged the resin by sanding down the wood. I decided to try my detail techniques on this one to see how they would look.
With this experiment I decided I preferred the copper detail only on the top.
To avoid ruining the resin on the rest of them I decided to cut the wood to the mold's thickness and sand and re-stain before casting it on the resin. This process was terrifying as the pieces were already very small. Because I was scared I decided to place two wooden pieces that were bigger and clamp them around the wood in order to put them through the band saw but the pressure must've been too great because the saw started smoking and then stopped while still being on.
I asked the staff at the shop and they recommended I used my hands very carefully. I proceeded like this which was a disaster as I didn't get straight cuts. I tried straightening it a bit using the sander on the disk side.
I restained the whole thing with several coats which took a whole day to completely dry so that I wouldn't repeat my previous mistake.
After drying I proceeded to set the wood in the molds and mix the resin to pour around it. This time I wanted to mix it slower so I wouldn't create bubbles and once poured it looked like it was going to be a beautiful project. Once the blue resin was dry on the top, I mixed some clear resin and poured it on top of everything as a finish.
It turns out I didn't mix this second batch of resin well enough (trying to avoid bubbles) because after 28 hours they hadn't dried (which didn't happen the first time).
The clear resin broke as I tried to move it and dry it with a heat gun. But once I took them out of the molds I also realized that the blue part didn't dry completely either so they were pretty much ruined.
Only two survived and I applied the details to those.
Had they all turned out like these I would've been completely happy but as it is I could only complete two out of the 6 I casted in resin.
On to the Hazmat Suit related title of this post: As I worked with different materials (the wood stain, some alcohol to get rid of stickiness and the resin) I read the instructions and warnings on the bottles and it occurred to me that almost all of these were poisonous or can give you cancer or if sanded or heated could give off poisonous gas or flakes. I felt at some point that, being surrounded by all this poison, I should probably get a hazmat suit so I didn't need to worry about how to handle the materials.
Thinking back I should've probably done a basic wood coaster and nothing else.
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