Oh Resin...
- Dec 22, 2022
- 4 min read
So I first started learning the ins and outs of resin a couple of months ago..... and let me tell you.... it has been a tricky tricky road. Some things have turned out incredibly cool, but others have been a total bust. There will be no shortage of resin posts, but for now I'm starting out with my most recent resin.... experiment.... that's probably the best word for it.
My dad does a lot of hunting and has a ton of used/empty shell casings, so I wanted to use some of those and make a pencil holder for him! Here are all the materials I used:
There's the silicone mold of course, the two parts epoxy resin and hardener, the colorants I decided to use, a torch and also a heat gun that isn't shown, silicone spatula for stirring, and the shell casings! There's also a homemade pressure pot type thing that will be shown later in the post!
So to start out, I needed equal amounts of part A and part B for the resin, so I poured those and started mixing! The mixing is apparently one of the most important steps for making good resin without too many bubbles.... I'm talking 10 minutes of slow and deliberate stirring! Side note: I've had half my resin stuff come out with very little bubbles, but the other half have either had a couple of big ones, or a ton of the tiny micro bubbles. I'm still trying to figure out what works best for clearing out every single one of those pesky little things.
After I measured and mixed for a long while, I added in the colors! One of the ones I used was a gunmetal alcohol ink solution, and the other was a black powder specifically for epoxy resin.
After I mixed the colors in really well, I still had some bubbles I wanted to get out, and one way some people get rid of the bubbles is by literally sucking the air out with a pressure pot! But those are hundreds of dollars, so in comes the homemade version! A pot, a lid, a vacuum seal bag, and a little shop vac!
I did a couple cycles of vacuuming the air out, probably about another 10 minutes worth! During that time I needed to fill the holes in the casings with U.V. resin.... another way to avoid bubbles!
So basically I put some U.V. resin right on the top of the bullets and immediately hit them with the U.V. light to get the resin to harden and seal over them right away.
Once those were all done, it was time to take the cup of resin out of the vacuum pot and get rid of all the bubbles that were able to rise to the surface! That's where the torch comes in! Except the torch I was planning on using stopped working on me, so I used the heat gun instead! Aaaaaand I got a video of this part because I think it looks pretty cool... This is the first time I'm trying to post a video on here though, so I apologize if it doesn't work!
After that, I poured the resin into the mold, but only filled up about half way. Then I dropped in the bullets and let them settle in some! I've learned that you can try to place things in these molds a certain way, but they're still going to do what they please during that long curing time. Once the casings were nice and covered and the resin was able to fill in all the gaps around them, I poured in the rest of the resin! After that, I waited a few more minutes to let some more bubbles rise to the top and then used the heat gun on it one more time before letting it cure.
10 hours later.......
There's still some bubbles, and for some reason one of the casings decided to lay horizontal instead of vertical, and it's not quite the color I was wanting..... But all still a good process in getting familiar with the ins and outs of resin! I think if I were to do something with shell casings again in the future I would scrub the down and clean them really well in case that had something to do with the coloring, and then I'd also completely fill each casing with epoxy resin the day before instead of the U.V. resin. Like I said before I'm still very new at this, and almost every how to video with resin seems like they get perfect results every time.... but there's a huge learning phase most people don't show! So I'm determined to show all the parts I experience with resin..... the awesome stuff, the decent stuff, and stuff destined for the garbage! I'm decently happy with this attempt though, it seems like everything put in to resin reacts a little differently, so it was interesting seeing what the shell casings did!
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