All You Need to Know About Casting Burl Wood with Alumilite Resin

Hey guys, so today I am going to show you my process of how I cast my burl wood with the resins to go into bows or for anything you're going to use. This is a piece of buckeye burl that I cast with blue pearlescent resin. I was doing a sample. Now this video is going to have a lot of information in it if you're going to do this on your own, and I'm going to Structure it as if you are going to do this on your own, because that's the whole point of this. I want to teach people how to do this, and but at the same time show you how I do it in my process. And hopefully this will make sense also why burl wood bows are as expensive as they are, because it's very time-consuming. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge. That being said, I figured out a lot of this stuff For myself. There's a lot of info you can get online, but hopefully by you guys watching this, if you're interested in this and you want to do it, it'll take the learning curve out of it, a lot of the learning curve out. So here again, this is a piece of wood, buckeye burl, that I stabilized. It's actually not stabilized, it's just cast with Alumilite resin. This is Alumilite resin right here. Now here's the piece that we're going to cast today. This is a piece of buckeye burl. This has been stabilized in cactus juice. Then we're not going to go over the stabilization portion of it today. Um, if you want perfect results, you really need to stabilize burl wood before you cast it. However, you don't have to necessarily do that, and, and if it's not burl wood, you don't necessarily have to stabilize it. Before you cast it. Burl wood, if it's going in a bow, it's getting stabilized if it's burl wood from my shop, because burl wood is just too unreliable. It doesn't have the structural stability for me to trust it in a bow without it being stabilized in a vacuum chamber with stabilizing resin. So, but today I'm just going to show you the casting portion after it's been stabilized. So this is a piece of buckeye burl.

It has been stabilized.

Now, important thing is, before you stabilize or cast, the wood has got to be at 0% moisture. I can't emphasize how important that is. It is extremely important. I don't care what it takes you. I don't care if you got to make you a little oven with heat bulbs. I'll show you my ovens when we, when we move on through the video, but you need to be at 0% moisture. If you're going to stabilize or cast, and I'll show you why. For instance, this block right here, I was trying something with my— I was trying some different techniques and stuff, and I just had this piece floating around, and it was, it was dried down to what it naturally will air dry to in southwest Kansas, which is about anywhere from 6 to 9%. That's not dry enough if you're going to cast or stabilize, but Because I wasn't going to use this in my bow and I just, I was trying something with my casting chamber, my pressure chamber, I went ahead and casted it. Well, it pulled away. If you'll see, I don't know if you can see this on video, but right here, that resin, that wood, it pulled away from the resin because the wood was still moving with the environment and it was changing its internal moisture. And as it does that, it moves. And And it pulled away from the resin. That's what you'll get if you do not dry the wood down to 0%. Now there's only one spot here that it pulled away. It's right here. Otherwise it hasn't pulled away none of these other spots, but that's because it's a big chunk of resin right here and not very much wood. And so it wanted to pull away there. If you had a piece of wood that had just a few voids in it, And you could probably get by without drying it. I would never do it if I was going to build a product to sell, but if it was for something that you were building and you just had it— say you just had these little wormholes in here, um, you'd probably get by with it. Wouldn't recommend it if you're doing it, um, to sell, or if you want it to be professionally done. Please dry the wood down to 0%.

I do.

I dry all my wood in this oven right here. And I just run heat bulbs. I constantly have wood drying in here. It's constantly— there's big pieces of wood. That's a big piece of, uh, slab of buckeye burl and boinya burl. You got spalted tamarind. There's weru burl. This is black mango. There's a guava over there. More tamarind. That's a piece of myrtle burl. Black mango behind there. Um, Here's a triangle of buckeye. I even got some banksia pod right down there, that little pine cone looking thing. Banksia pod from Australia. Once again, this isn't your typical wood. Still got to be dry, still got to be at 0% to stabilize and cast. Okay, so this is where I dry it down. I dry it all down to 0% here. This guy right here, that is my pressure chamber. And we'll use that later on in the video, and I'll explain that as we go. And, and, and that, that is built with a piece of irrigation pivot pipe that came from the pivot irrigation sprinkler systems out here. Um, I believe that's an 8-inch or a 6-inch. That's a 6-inch. And we just got a section of that and custom welded some fittings on it, and then I had the end of it honed at an irrigation mechanic shop. So that a steel plate will fit on that, and then a gasket, and then we pressure that up. We'll, we'll show that later in the video. Okay, so first part of this is dry the wood down to 0%. I don't care how you do it, there's a lot of info online. First step, dry the wood down to 0%. Now we're going to move over to how to build the box to cast your, your piece. Okay, here we are over here where I build my boxes for my casting forms. Now I wanted to show you here. Now this piece, like I said, it's been stabilized. Now when it comes out of the stabilization chamber, let me show you what it looks like really quick. Okay, so here's a piece that has— this is a piece of buckeye burl, and this has come out of the stabilization chamber. It's been baked. The resin is cured, but it hasn't been cleaned up. Now, if you'll see, if you look in these voids, it's full of crystallized resin all in here. You cannot leave that in there. And that is another reason why Buckeye Burl bows are so stinking expensive. All of this has to be cleaned out by hand. Now, what I do is I pick it out. I have different sizes of picks. I'll pick out the big stuff by hand. And then when I get to where most of the big stuff's picked out, I will take it to my sandblaster. Now I have a piece of junk sandblaster, real cheap sandblaster, because I can't afford a real nice one, but hopefully someday. But I sandblast this and to get all the, the little chunks of resin out. And then I'll, after I sandblast it, go back, pick out the chunks that that exposes, go back to the sandblaster, keep doing that. Sometimes it takes many, many cycles of doing that. Takes a very long time. And, um, and it, it soaks up a huge amount of time, and that's all part of why, um, burl bows are so expensive, because it just takes forever. So that's how it looks like coming out of the stabilization chamber when it's ready to be cleaned up for casting. Okay, now this is clean, cleaned up, sandblasted, ready to cast. Oh, and I want to show you here so you can take a look here. So this has been dried to 0%, and once it's stabilized, once it's been through the vacuum chamber, it basically will stay at 0%. I don't know that I ever see it gain moisture. It's probably a good idea to cast it pretty quickly within— oh, just turned off on me because I wasn't using it. But it's probably a fairly good idea to cast it within the first couple months. After it's been vacuum stabilized, uh, just because, just for the off chance that it will gain moisture. I don't ever see it gain moisture, but it, I'm— it can happen. I'm sure everything can take on moisture. Okay, let's— I'll just show you here. So I can stick this in, and it's rock hard now. Now this stuff is like balsa wood when it— before it stabilized. Now it's just rock hard from that stabilization. Yeah, I can push those probes in, and you can see it's still at 0%. So it's ready for casting. Okay. All right, now this is just a piece of cardboard, and what I want to do now is just build a simple box. It doesn't have to be complicated. What I'm going to do is it's kind of like wrapping a Christmas present. So I'm going to make— I'm going to look at kind of the, the amount there, and then I kind of want that same on my end pieces. So that's about an inch and a half. So then I'm going to flip it like this, Move over to about an inch and a half and then roll it down. And now measure, and that's about 3 inches. So then I'll leave that block right where it is. In fact, just to be safe, I can mark around it so that it doesn't move. Now I'll cut these little flaps off later, so it doesn't have to be exact. I'll cut them off later, but we're going to just get close. So we'll measure over 3 inches. Okay, now kind of have the rough length of our box. Put a straight edge on here, a square, and then we'll go ahead and cut. Now we want to run— now that's going to be close enough, so we'll just run clear up to the end of the square. Okay, now what I want to do is so I can use this crease here, this bend, And I, I just kind of pre-bent that. I didn't show that on camera to keep the video a little shorter, but I kind of pre-bent it just to kind of get it rough shape. This will let me know where I want to cut up here. So I'll go from this bend here, and it's about 3 inches. I usually make it about 3 inches on a, on an inch and a half block. This is an inch and a half block. Oh, once again, I failed to say that we are going to be giving this away after it's been cast. Uh, make a beautiful— you could probably get a couple sets of knife scales out of it, or, or you could, if you turn pins or whatever, um, you could, uh, make some cool stuff out. Or if you just wanted a cool paperweight, we're going to cast this with orange pearlescent resin, and then we're going to be giving this away. And if you want a chance at it, just comment, subscribe, and share this video. And that's going to go ahead and get you entered to, uh, to win this block of stabilized and cast Buckeye Burl after we're finished here. We'll leave it open for about a week before we, uh, put all the, uh, the commenters in a pool and draw one out.

So now we're going to measure up 3 inches from this crease.

Oops.

I could just go there, sort of the end of the crease. Doesn't have to be perfect. Like I said, I'm going to cut these wings off. I'll show you when it'll make sense, whenever.

Um, so I can measure down from that crease too. Doesn't have to be perfect. So I could even come up here, and that's about what, an inch and a quarter? So I could just go like this if I wanted to. You know, it's all going to get shaved down. So now we'll go ahead and cut this out. All righty.

Okay, that's our box size. Now, whenever you make a box, you want to leave yourself a little bit of room. I'll show you. So you see how that's— it's not, it's not a lot.

You do not want the edges of your box tight up on your piece because that will inhibit the, the flow of the resin down into the voids. There's several other things I'll go over on that also to show you how not to inhibit the resin. But so you want to give yourself about anywhere from a 1/16 To an 8th. An 8th of an inch is even better. This is, this is probably just a hair under an 8th of an inch, um, on there. So, so now I have kind of where I want my box here. So I'm just going to cut inside the creases here and to get them perfectly, leave myself a little bit of room. You know, I'm going to leave a little bit of room on these edges, but I also want to leave about an 8th of an inch on the ends too. So I'm going to move my cut line out that way too, just to give that room. Okay, right into the shoulder or into the edge of the crease. Okay, now I'll cut this side. Make sure once again, kind of fold it up so I can see where to cut.

Right in the edge, the very corner of the crease.

And the corner of the crease.

Perfecto. Alrighty, now I'm going to turn this kind of on edge. Actually, first we're going to go like this, put this on our line, and, and see this, this block's a little bit smaller than those lines I've drawn, so we're going to move it over to where on the line. That gives us our 1/8 of an inch. room, like I was saying, for sure. Press down, fold up the tab. Hopefully that gives us enough room. Okay, once you have that, then come in here, fold up the side of the box. Takes about 3 hands to do this sometimes. Like that.

And then just push that in just like that.

Now before I glue this, I want to make sure I have enough size And it's going to be pretty tight. It always wants to do this, so you need to give yourself a little extra room.

So make sure—

yeah, that's going to work.

Okay.

I'm just going to mark this here.

You don't even have to do that.

Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. Put your medium CA on your tab like that, then you spray this side with your accelerator, flip it up, work fast, go vertical, hold it, just hold it on there just like that. It'll cure up real fast. Then I'll come here with my knife right down. Okay, that's one edge of the box. Now I want to make sure I have enough room here, so before I do this side, I'm going to move it over. You know, give yourself— see that void in there? Make sure that's in there so that you have enough room. Okay, now I'm going to pull this one up here. So there, I still have enough room in there. Okay, now we're going to do the same thing here. Before we do that, use the edge of my block to pre-bend that.

It wants to, it wants to really squeeze up on you and make it smaller, and as it did on this one, really that's a little too tight. Um, we don't care on this block. This block can be any size and shape, but I'm just showing you what can happen. I would, I would give myself a little bit extra room. I made these a little too narrow if you're going to do this, but usually you have the room. I mean, you're gonna— and I'll show you what to do because I made this a little bit tight.

I'll show you what to do to fix that.

Happens quite a bit to me when I'm talking for sure, and I'm trying to do a couple things at once. Okay, once again.

Now we seal it. This is a very important step. We just want to seal these edges. This is a one-time sacrificial box. We're not going to use it After we cast this block. It does not matter what happens to it, but we do not want it to leak resin. And if you use this method, I promise you it will not leak resin. It will, it will be perfect. So I just seal up those edges, seal this edge here, right here, and all these are pretty much sealed anyway. We're just, we're foolproofing it. We don't want no accidents.

Resin floating everywhere. So I do the outside. I don't have to be super picky on the outside. Now on the inside, I want to seal this for sure. So I'll go down here. Now I don't have to seal— I'm going to seal this, these edges on the ends only. We don't have to, we don't have to run glue along these here sides. Hold it towards the camera. So I'm just gonna— so what I did there is I just, I got those inside corners, and that's only on the end cap that you have to do that. You just want to make that a perfect line of glue. Now you can see here that glue isn't all the way into that crack, but it doesn't have to be because that's where the fold-over of the cardboard— that's not broken here. Neither one of these is broken. If you do it this way, you have a fold-over edge on both sides. This is a fold-over edge here. This is a fold-over edge here where resin literally cannot flow through there. It would have to flow all the way through this here interior fold to get out, and it can't. So just by us sealing this up with resin, we're just giving ourselves insurance, but it ain't going out of there. There's no way it can. So do this here corner. See here, I just do it because it gives me peace of mind. We used to try to, um, when Nick was working here, he would try to seal these off with plastic. You just don't need to do that because you're gonna throw this box away anyway, and it's just a waste of time to use plastic. But it just— all you got to do is just seal that with the glue. Okay, that box is beautiful. Now, as I was building this, I was building it rather fast, like I was saying, and so it's probably a little too tight lengthwise. Let's see here. And it is. Which is fine. That— we've got plenty of room. That's, that's a 5-inch block. Even if you're gonna— a lot of knives only need a 4-inch handle. So if I wasn't talking and I need it— so let's say this block was really important to me, I would have been really careful that I didn't get it too tight. I got it perfect on the width, the width way here. It's absolutely perfect. A little bit tight on the lengthwise. So all we're going to do is we're just going to trim one end off and, uh, We'll be good to go. And that's a perfect fit. Okay, let's see what that is. Yeah, it's, it's still a great size for a knife handle because your hand is like that big. It's a beautiful size. It's still 4¾ inches, um, by 2 inches by 1½. Okay, so that's what you want. You want a loose fit. You don't want it sticking in there because if it's sticking, you're going to impede the flow of resin. It goes down to there. Now we don't need this much height, but I'm going— I said, I know I said I was going to trim these. If I had to fit inside my pressure tank and it had to be a certain height, I would just trim this down on my table saw to get in there. Now I could still do that, but it is nice to have a little bit of insurance, to have a little bit of extra room so that, you know, your glue doesn't slosh over the edge.

Your your resin.

Plus, I know I have plenty of height, so I'm just going to leave it this high. It just it really doesn't matter. If I needed to trim that down, all I would do is run it here on my table saw, just like that, and one pass, and you've got your box trimmed down to size. But I don't need to do that. So let's head over to the casting table, and we'll get some resin mixed up. All right, here we are back over at our casting table. Now I'm going to tell you the formula. for the amount of resin that you need for your block. Now, I have developed a formula. We're not going to use that today because it's kind of complicated, um, and it takes— maybe someday I'll explain it. I've got it written on here. It's actually width times length times 0.5 times 0.554. We're not going to use that one today. That one's like a micromanaging resin calculator. However, you have to understand voids. So what I mean by that is you've got to understand about the volume that your voise will take to use that formula. Now, a far, far easier formula that you can just find online is found— I don't know if you can see this, but Mini Web Tool Resin Casting Volume Calculator. Super easy, anybody can do it. And you just go to this Mini Web Tool Resin Casting Volume Calculator. So I can type in here. So I've got a rectangular mold, so I put in rectangular mold. And what dimensions do I want to measure in, centimeters or inches? If you're in the UK or Europe, you're probably going to use centimeters, or Canada. In the US, we use inches, so I'm going to push on inches. And then it says enter my length, width, and depth. So my length on this one is 4— is, uh, 4 point 7.5. My width is 2. My depth is 1.5, and I just want 1 mold, 10% waste margin. It'll probably mix a lot more than we need. That's what I'm hoping. Um, I, I've never used this before. I just, I just did it just because it was— it's going to be simpler for people watching this than my, my formulas. Um, so we'll see how much extra. Maybe it'll be right on. I don't know. We'll see. But, but you can't— it's hard to take into account the size of your Your voids. So this is— this should be a safety net for us. So we'll put calculate resin and hardener. Okay, so let's come down here and it's asking for— it's telling us 128.4. No, I don't want an ad. No, thank you. Uh, 128.4 milliliters Part A and Part B, because this is a 1 to 1. Uh, this is Alumilite resin and it's, it's Clear Slow Alumilite resin. Um, Alumilite is fantastic casting resin, but if you get it, do not get the fast stuff because you only have like 7 minutes working time. With this stuff, you have 12 minutes and it's even, it's really, you gotta work fast. But I use the clear slow because you still, it's a 4-hour demold time. And a lot of times, you know, I want to keep working. I don't want to wait 24 hours or 36 hours. So, um, the clear slow is my favorite. This is an 80-pound kit. You're probably not going to want to buy that. It's very expensive. But I get all my stabilizing and casting products from Turn-Tex, which we'll post the link down in the underneath the video. Turn-Tex, fantastic place for stabilizing and casting. Only place to go in my opinion. Best chambers. Now they don't— this is a homemade casting chamber, but the vacuum chambers I get from them and they are the best hands down.

Okay.

So back over to our, um, our calculator here, it's telling us that this is in milliliters. I'm going to ignore that because my scale doesn't have that. What my scale does have is grams and ounces. So underneath here it does say grams and ounces. So it's telling me 141.3 grams per A and per B. So that's what we're going to do. And, um, uh, with a total of 282.6 grams with 10% waste margin.

Okay.

Seems like quite a lot just right now, but it might be right. We'll find out. So let's, uh, 141.3 grams. Okay, so before we do that, what we're going to use is today I'm going to use the Roleo pearlescent pigment. This is a powdered pearlescent powder for casting resins. Okay, I use Roleo. Now I will say this, This stuff works great. My favorite of any pearlescent casting mica powders is the brand Tekarus. This is a mica powder. This is the turquoise gel. You will not find this turquoise gel. They discontinued it. I've been scouring the web for it. Once in a great while, I'll find a can of it on eBay. If you find it and you like turquoise, buy it immediately. It is the most beautiful color. Of, uh, mica powder for, for the, uh, Alumilite resins or casting resins that you can find. There's a lot of different— like, here's a turquoise from MaySpring, and really it's just more blue than anything. It's— I wouldn't even call that turquoise. That's just a shade of blue almost. This has your, your green and blue mix in it. Um, it'll work. It's just more of a blue turquoise than, than your green, which depends on where you get real turquoise. Sometimes it is bluer. Sometimes it is greener. Um, this looks the most natural in my opinion, but the Tekaruz brand, I like it the best. When I say the best, they're all very, very close. You're not going to screw up by getting the Rolyo or the Tekaruz or the MaySpring. They all work nearly identical. Um, so today we're going to use Rolyo, and I just buy this off of Amazon. We'll post the link down underneath the video. Rolyo pigments, mica powder, and I mean, you got Tons of colors in this set. It goes a long ways. You don't want to overwhelm your resin also, um, with your pigment or your powder. So, but you can put quite a bit in. And, and for sure, like, if you're casting for limbs, if you are casting, uh, laminations for bow limbs, you have to concentrate it pretty heavily.

For sure.

If it's a light color like white, Because what happens is you'll— you have to grind those laminations so thin you'll literally see through that and you'll see the bamboo underneath, and it's not a good look. Um, if you look back at my Facebook posts, you'll see I did, uh, a month or two ago I did a buckeye burl with white pearlescent resin. That was the hardest burl casting job bow I've ever done in my entire life. It was so difficult because that white Um, that white powder, I, I struggled and struggled getting the right ratio because you could always see through it, and it was so frustrating. And I did get it, and the customer is very happy with it, but it, it just about kicked my butt. Alrighty, so that's all about the powders. We've got our box, we've got our block here. Now, before we get started, this—

so I have these little blocks here.

These are hold-down blocks for inside my molds. What I do is I put my block in here, of course, and you do not want this block floating up inside your mold. You're going to have a big problem on your hands if this sucker floats up. And let's say it floats up and it comes out the top and you get it cast like that. Big problem. That's going to destroy your piece, your casting piece. These hold-down blocks, they're sacrificial blocks of wood, and you put them in there and then you tape them down from the top of And they'll hold it down. You just cut them off when you're done. These blocks that I had, they weren't quite big enough, so I glued 2 together and voilà, there you have a big enough, thick enough block. And what I'll do is I'll just tape it down like that once we get, once we get our resin in there.

Okay.

So I've got all my pieces set up. Now remember, I only have 12 minutes once I mix the A to the B. So put our gloves on.

I—

you know what, I'm not even gonna use gloves. I've done this so many times, I hardly get any on my hands, and if I do, it'll just be a small amount. I always start with the A side for some reason. Okay, let's get our scale on. Now with all my talking, I need to write this down because I forgot what— it'll still be 141. So 141.3 grams with a total of 282.6. I don't have to do the points, it's not that critical. Okay, so we'll put this— we'll go with the grams. So it's showing 30, we'll go ahead and clear it out to tare. Then we'll go 141. Also, just watching it, I can watch it and see if I think it's not going to be enough, I'll add more because, um, last— you definitely want more, a little bit extra than not enough. And I've never used this web tool before. I've always used my formula. Okay, 130. Now I can go over on the, uh, on the first pour. I can't go over on the second. I just have to match it if I go over on the first pour. Okay, that's 143 right there, 143 grams. Let's look at that and see what we think. Now it climbed to 144, which is fine. So if we double that, we're going to be up to there.

Hmm.

I think it'll be enough. We don't—

we have—

this is a big void here, but that's not a very big void. So I think it'll be enough. So, oh, one thing I was going to say before we cast this, how you put your block in, it's really important because the last— you cannot— you don't want to create a trap where the void is starved of resin.

Let's say Let's say you have a void right here, but there's no access to it all the way through the block. And let's say for some reason you weren't thinking and you put it down inside the mold on that void. Well, you're effectively— you just sealed off that void and the resin cannot get to it. No way, no how. Once in a great while, I'll have a void that I can't get to it. I want to, I want to position the block of wood And I, I have to cover that void up. If I have a situation like that case, I'll drill a hole. I'll drill a vent hole down through the block so it taps into that void so that resin can fill into that void, or else fill from the bottom and vent the air out of it so there's no airlock. Got to be mindful of that for sure when you're doing this. Um, and you've got some high-dollar pieces of wood that you've already put a massive amount of effort into from On vacuum stabilizing it, cleaning it up with the sandblaster. By the way, there's my sandblaster. It's just a $250 Harbor Freight sandblaster, really cheap piece of junk, but it gets the job done. If you guys want to buy me a nice one, I would love that. But anyway, um, so what I was saying is, yeah, you don't want to ruin your block, so you got to be mindful of where those voids are and can the resin get to it. Have you created a trap or an airlock? So looking at this piece, this is— I've got access to this here void all the way. If I put it this way, if I put it this way, resin is getting to that one. I'm not worried about this one. This void here is a little bit bigger of a problem. I really want to put— because if I put it like that, the only access I have is from this side and the top. Now, if you made your form a little tight, You just wouldn't want to trust all the access coming in from the side, and for sure not that little hole. But if I put it this side up, I should be just fine because the resin can flow down into there, and I've got a little vent down there, and it can— it should flow all the way around. So looking at my block, I do have a little void right here. That one still has access to the top. It can be filled with resin. So looking at this block everywhere, I'm going to put it with this side up. And if you get confused, you can just write up on it so that you don't screw up once you have your resin mixed. So that's how we'll put it in there, and, uh, that way all the voids have access to the resin and we haven't created an airlock. Now, without my talking, my scale turned off, but I know what it was sitting at—

144.

So before I mix part— because once we mix Part B, we've got to be moving. We, we can't screw around. So before I do that, we're going to put our powder in. Now you do have to be careful. You don't want to put too much powder in. You can overwhelm the resin. You can weaken the resin to the point of failure if you put too much pearlescent mica powder in. You can actually weaken it. Now, how much would too much be? Uh, that's a good question, and it really just kind of depends. For the most part, it's not something you need to worry about too much. It's It's only going to happen in extreme cases. Like, for instance, with this much resin, it's probably going to be, you know, up to there by the time I put Part B in. With that much resin, I could put this whole thing in and it wouldn't ruin it, I don't think. Oh, I know it wouldn't because I've done it before. I put that much in. But let's say I put— let's, let's say, okay, so there's— you can see about how much is left in there. Let's say I put that much in. With resin, you know, about that much resin. I would never— you'd ruin it. You'd weaken this. You'd have way too much, too much powder and concentration of this that you would weaken the properties, the tensile elongation and the adhesion properties of this resin to the point of failure. So that would be a problem. You do have to be mindful of that. If you want to know exactly what your resin can take, you need to look up the data specs on wherever you got your resin. And also you need to look up the specs of your mica pearlescent powder where you got that, and it will tell you how much you can put in. I know how much I can put in just from a lot of experience, but if you're not— if you're unsure of that, definitely need to look that up. So I'm going to use— I want this fairly concentrated. I don't want it to be that light. I don't want to be able to see through it on something like this. I'm going to use about half this little can. On this, and let's just— you can see it here. I'll put it up here. So I'm going to use about half this little dude, and I wouldn't have to. Um, it's probably good. Maybe not quite half. That'll probably be enough. I don't want to see through it. I want it to be pretty, uh, I want it to be fairly, uh, concentrated and nice orange color. So there's about that. That's not quite half. That's probably a third of what was in there. I used probably a third. I think that's going to be enough. We can always add a little bit more if once we get Part B worked in, if we're like— and I'll show you how to do that too. I'll show you how to calculate if you, if you're thinking it's too thin. Um, I'll show you that. You know, I probably should have put gloves on now that I'm looking at this because I do get powder on my hands.

Um, probably put gloves on here.

I'm gonna go ahead and mix this up. Um, you want to mix it up pretty good, you know, kind of get it. Now we are going to put Part B in yet, so that's going to raise the height of it. I don't have to mix it up perfect, but the less mixing I can do after it's mixed up, once both parts are together, the better, because you're building heat. This stuff will build heat and you'll accelerate the speed at which it cures. And we want, we want that. We only have 12 minutes, so we, we might need that time, or we might just be just fine and we might only need 5 minutes. But you can't— you just never know.

So, okay, that looks pretty good. It's real pretty.

So now I can take this. This is how I test to see if it's, if it's thin enough or thick enough as far as the concentration of the pigment, the powder. And, and what I do is I look at that on my mixing stick. Now these little mixing sticks, I just get these from Home Depot. Um, they're like $2 for a pack of 50. They're awesome for resin and stuff. So what I do is I look at this and I kind of let it drip off the edge and see how thin I can get it and see if I can still see through it. So right there, I'm probably only about less than a 16th of an inch thick. I cannot see through it to the wood below. So I don't need to add resin now, or I mean pigment powder now. However, after I add Part B, we're going to do the same thing again and see how opaque it got, how much it thinned it out. If it still is like that, we're not going to add any more. If it thinned it out— so let me show you. So if it thins, see, I can see the wood through that. If it thinned it out that far, I'm going to add a little bit more. I don't think it will, um, because I don't— on this particular pour, I don't want to see through it. We're at 0 grams. I know the weight of the stick is in there. That doesn't matter because we're just going to add 144 grams because we know that's how much resin we put in. We're going to add 144 of Part B. This is Part A. This is Part B. Once we do that, I'm going to look at our timer, make sure we have everything in order. We've got our box. We've got our, our burl block. We've got our hold down. We've got our tape to tape our hold-down piece down. Um, should be it. Um, well, we'll just prep our, our casting chamber real quick. I, I wouldn't have to do this, but I'll show you how this works so I don't have to. This is just a rubber gasket, and this here has been honed at an irrigation mechanic shop so that it's, it's totally flat. And then I just get this rubber from Amazon. You could buy it in sheets, and we could put that link down in the description. But, um, it's just 1/8-inch rubber, and I use it for so much stuff in the shop, all kinds of stuff. But once this wears out, and you can see it's getting a little tattered, wore, I just cut me a new gasket out of a sheet of, uh, of black rubber, and we're good to go again. This just seals off my chamber. I air this up to anywhere between 60 to 100 PSI. Um, you can buy pressure chambers, pressure pots, pretty much everywhere. Um, the— because I, I need a horizontal chamber because I cast laminations for bows, I need a long horizontal chamber. Those pressure pots don't work for me. Now, if you're just doing small blocks of wood for knife scale or stuff, those pressure pots would be great. They don't work for me. I need a long chamber, so I custom built my own. But if you don't need that, you can pick one of those pressure pots up for Probably $300 or $400, and they work fantastic. Um, so this one here, like I said, it's a 6-inch diameter pivot irrigation pipe that I've custom done, and then it just has this big giant, uh, half-inch plate of steel that goes on this bad boy. And then like I said, I air it up to, uh, between 60 and 100 PSI. Now for proper casting, they say not— you know, if you get to 60 PSI, you You don't need to go any higher than that. 60 PSI is heavy enough. What it does is it crushes the bubbles. So if you'll notice, if you've watched any resin casting tutorials, you'll see they get it, they take a torch and they're going over the top of it, heating and popping the bubbles. Don't need to do that if you have pressure. Pressure casting is far, far better than the heat method because even with proper heating with a little torch, you're not going to get them all. It's still— still going to have some bubbles. With pressure casting, no bubbles. It will take them and it will crush them to where there's— they can't be seen with the human eye. So as you can see, this here piece right here, there is not a single bubble in this piece. It is absolutely perfect because it was pressured up between 60 and 100 PSI. I used to have a gauge on my chamber, but I kept breaking it. It's— the other thing is, is that's inside my oven, so that's got lots of heat, and that heat would ruin my gauge time and time again. I finally just took it off. I just pressure it up, um, and honestly, I just pressure it up until my— until it quits airing up from my air compressor, which is probably like 135 PSI. Uh, it works fantastic. I know that's too much pressure, but I've never had an issue with that much pressure, and it works. It may be the reason I do get such beautiful casts. Um, and bubble-free cast. But, uh, just definitely want to make sure if you're gonna do this, um, do not have moisture in your airline. Um, and that's one thing, before I started this video, I bled out the airline. I do have an air dryer, but it's broken down right now. But if you have air— if you have water in your compressed airline and you introduce that into your casting chamber and into your mold and it gets in your resin, it will screw it.

It will ruin it.

Cannot, cannot have water coming up into your airline, into your pressure chamber. If you have a pressure pot that you get off of eBay or Amazon or somewhere online, can't have water in that either. One more thing. This here is under heat, so these heat bulbs are shining directly on here. And I turned it off last night because I knew I was going to make this video, and I don't want it super hot whenever I'm doing my resin casting. That is something that I had to learn also. You don't, you don't need to have heat for this. Now, now it does accelerate for me. I know how to use it and it runs and it does help me. But if I was doing, if I was getting set up to cast burl wood and stuff, I would not put heat on it. You don't need it. Um, in my situation I do because I'm trying to move things along. Um, let's say for some reason that you were a bowyer like me and you decided to put your casting chamber inside your oven like me. It's a fantastic thing to do, but I want to tell you something. If you do that, you probably should contact me and I could tell you some of the things to watch for. But one of the big things is, is on your light, on your light-colored casts, Uh, your clears and your whites, they will not handle the heat. They will discolor. So if you keep it down around 100 degrees, you'll be fine. But my oven gets quite a bit hotter than that. But if you have white, um, like that bow I was telling you about, um, the first cast I did, I destroyed the first block I put in there simply by heat. It was a beautiful cast. It was the perfect color I wanted, everything, but I destroyed it because I overheated it. And it discolored it and it turned it— it had yellow spots in it and streaks in it, ruined it. So one of the things I've learned from experience and history of running this thing, you just got to be careful, be wary of that. So, okay, we've got our casting chamber ready, um, no obstructions there. The air hose is ready. I've bled out the, the compressed line of all moisture, compressed air line, and we are ready. So I'm going to move my phone over here. I think I've got everything laid out. And with all my talking, once again my scale turned off. Not a problem. I don't want that resin to— okay, here. Okay, we're at 0 grams. We need 144. This is where it gets really tricky because it's hard to maneuver these. Um, Even that slight pressure. See, I don't want that touching that resin.

Okay, there you go.

Here, we'll just go like this.

It's good.

I don't want it too far off center. Okay, 144 grams.

Okay, all right, check our time.

14:43. It's a 24-hour clock, military time, so that's 2:43. So We need to be out. We need to be in the oven with it sealed down at 1455. That should be our 12 minutes. Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up.

143, 144.

Perfect.

Pulling it away. Okay, let's mix.

Let me put this on here. So. Mix this good. Like I said, once you have it, if you do your prep work— and I, I mix that, uh, mica powder in pretty good before I put in Part B. I always do.

Um, so then I just basically have to blend the resins together because the more you stir it, you're building heat and you're just accelerating that cure time. Okay, so that's stirred up pretty good. Now let's go ahead and do our opaque test, our transparency test. That's good. You're not going to see through that. I don't have to put any more powder in. I'm happy with that. Now you can see with this resin, if you look at it, if I let it sit, see how beautiful it is? You see how it's got depth to it? See how it's all 3D and shimmery? And that's that pearlescent powder inside there. So it's going to be just gorgeous.

Okay.

So let's go ahead and put this down. Now, very important. You don't want to put your block in and then pour resin over it. You want to put resin in first. Not, not all of it, but some of it for sure. So we want to pour this in and cover the entire bottom. Nice coat. You don't want so much that it squeezes up and messes with your hold-down block. I think this is going to be plenty of resin, probably too much, but that's okay.

We don't want—

we would rather have too much than not enough. Okay, pop this in here, push it down, and then what I do is I'll just kind of lift it up, squish it down, make sure it really gets in there. And it doesn't even have to be down on the ground, down on the floor so hard. You just want to make sure every— all the voids that, that you're going to isolate or seal off have resin in them. Because if there are any holes where you're sealing that off, um, then it won't get— it won't see resin again until you— I don't know what I'm trying to say. But anyway, okay. So put our hold-down blocks on there and This guy here. Now here again, I don't want to push down too hard on this because I don't care if it floats a little bit down there. If I seal that bottom off, then any resin that's underneath there is, you know, if any void that's underneath that block, no resin can get to it if I really push that block down hard. I don't want to do that on this piece. Okay, that's perfect. You can see I have a black dark line around all the way around. Okay, let's go ahead and fill her up. Put some on this side, some on this side. Okay, good. I'm going to stop right there. 14:47, so I've used up 4 minutes. Now, very important. What I've got here, Sawzall, taking a blade, heated it up and bent it around. I'm going to vibrate this just like I would concrete. This is just to get it all in there. Now this is going to introduce bubbles, of course, but we— our pressure is going to take care of the bubbles. Okay, lovely. Now that's, that's perfect. Let's see here, a little bit more. Alrighty, that's gonna be— so I've got a little bit of covering over the top of it, and, um, I've got about that much left, so that's— I know now from using that formula I could have got a little bit less, but there again, I'd rather have too much than not enough and have a nasty surprise. Um, okay, let's go ahead and put it in the chamber. And let's see here, the Chamber of Secrets. And I like to just kind of level it, eyeball it, make sure it's in there nice and level. It doesn't hurt anything to do that. You want to do that with all your projects, to be honest. Um, okay, so we'll go ahead and put our gasket on, and we're sitting at 14:49. We currently have 6 minutes before D-Day. We have 6 minutes before it starts to set up on us. I always do this. It doesn't really matter how this gasket goes on, but there is a way it goes on better, and this is not it, but that doesn't matter. It's still gonna seal. Okay, now I do know this one because it has an arrow up. The weld on this bolt broke, so I just have to— okay. And I've got to get new nuts. I didn't think I'd have to say that out loud, but I've got to get new nuts for these here because I have really hammered these bad boys. Um, they're barely working, but they will work. Now this bad boy, and it's just like a car tire lug nuts, snug it up, go around. I don't want to go too tight. That's loud. Usually have my earbuds in. I gotta get earmuffs, that's too loud. We got 4 minutes, we're at 1451, we're sitting good. So let's go ahead and tighten her up. So when you're airing this up, if you have a chamber, you don't want to just slok air to it.

This end is kind of loose, but I'm just going to give it a little bit. Till I can hear it going in with this ball valve here.

See here, man.

Here we go.

Okay, I can hear it airing up. We still have 2 minutes left. We're fine because— okay, it's airing up. Also, you can feel it going in, but— So we're at 14:54 and 33 seconds. Still have 30 seconds to go, but we're under pressure. We're probably sitting at 100 PSI right now. I would— I want to be— I always like to be safe. Okay, that's all the way open, and I can feel how tight that is. 14:54, 52 seconds, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59. Game time. Apocalypse.

Okay, turn that off and we are aired up. Alrighty, we are a couple hours later here. This stuff dries really fast. Um, normally I would probably leave it in here For half a day. Don't have to though, you don't have to at all. It's, it's ready to go within an hour or 2 if you do, if you do your prep right, if you do your stabilization right, if you do your wood drying right. You can take it out in an hour, no problem. Here's our sample piece that we've tossed in here so we can feel that. It's been just under 2 hours since I put it in, and this is rock hard. So I can take this and pop it out. And, uh, there she is right there. Little hockey puck of Alumilite resin with, uh, pearlescent Rolyo mica powder. But that's rock hard. I can't put a fingernail in it real hard. So let's go ahead and let the air out. Now if there's no air that comes out of here, we're going to be in trouble. So we better hope there's air in here. Let's see, I'll blow it this way. Oh yeah, I don't feel any moisture coming out of it, so that's a good thing. Okay, all right, okay, now go ahead and unbolt this plate. Let's see if it— hopefully it didn't explode or implode. We know it held the air pressure. Oh, it's perfect! It's just sitting in there like it's supposed to.

Look at that!

So there is not a bubble to be seen.

Ooh, that's pretty.

Wow, that is pretty. It's a perfect, perfect casting job. All right, let's go break it free.

All right, here we are with the flat tender. What I want to do here, I just open this block up, um, on a side or two just so I can see it. Then I can run it through the table saw. Just looking at this, you can see that we had nothing leak nowhere. No leaks anywhere. You can build a box this way super fast to build them. I build all the boxes for giant blocks, for my huge riser blocks to lamination blocks. I build boxes that way and it just works so good and it's fast and easy. What we're going to do here is we're just going to grind down until we can get to— basically, we want to expose the block on 2 sides so that we can get it into, um, table saws. And most generally, the table saw I use—

we'll just—

every block is a little bit different, but I generally use the table saw to break it free, to break it loose from its cage. But we have to get down to where we have Solid block. And, you know, we do the best we can every cast. You, you do, you follow the steps, you do it right, you do it correctly, and most the time you end up with a perfect casting. But once in a while you, you have voids, and if you do have voids, you have to recast them. And sometimes you do, you have to recast the block a couple times before it's ready to go into a bow or whatever you're going to use it for. There again, that's why burl bows are so expensive. But we're hoping, we always hope. A lot of, a lot of times I get lucky and the first cast I get it perfect, there's no voids. But you can't always control everything. So we're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and break it down and down to the block and see where we're at here. Okay, so you can see I've carefully taken the cardboard and the resin all the way down. You can see right in here, this is probably from some saw marks from when the block was machined. It doesn't matter because we know we have solid block integrity all the way around. Now look at that casting, it's absolutely perfect. It's tied up to the edges, there's no bubbles or voids in it. So next thing we want to do is we want to remove one side Because we need, we need a 90-degree, we need a square side that we can run in the table saw. You can't really do it with just one open side like this. You have to have 2 open sides to cut the other sides off. Now, now the key here is as you're coming down, you want to, you want to go until you hit block and then you touch it. And then you keep removing cardboard and resin until it's all smooth. You don't want to just grind down, you know, you don't want to just set this down and grind down in one area because then you can really warp the size of your block and totally change the size of your block. So you want to keep that flat as much as possible and, and come down even with the block. Not with the shape, not, not just set it down and go. I hope— I don't know if that makes sense or not, but it is important. Okay, so look at that. All right, see how I carefully came down with it and, uh, I just, just barely eased through that last little layer? Now I have perfect structural integrity. Now This might not be square. We really would like this square. So let me grab this square here, because we can't run this through the table saw or anything if it's oh look at that! That's it's perfectly square, and that you'll that'll happen to you also when you demold cardboard box castings. If you're just really careful like I was, and you just. Gently. If you have a flat sander, you can do it on a disc sander. Um, let's see, you can do it on a belt sander, like if you just had a portable belt sander, if you turned it upside down and clamped it in a vise, you could do it that way. Um, you could do it on one of those combo sanders, one that have the little, the little, uh, belt with the disc. Of course, this is really nice for this if you have a flat sander. This is actually an edge sander, just Just laid down. But there's a variety of sanders that will do the same thing. Couldn't do it with a random orbit. You would really struggle doing it by hand. But now that we have a 90-degree square edge corner and we know it's perfect, um, and we're down to the solid block, you can see that beautiful casting in there. No bubbles, just perfect. Now let's take it over to the table saw and we can go ahead and cut the edges off of it. Okay, so over here at the table saw, all I need to do, I just need to measure. I know this is a 90-degree and I was really careful, so I know that basically I have a perfect block inside of here and the straightness of this guy should line up with my block. So I just need to measure. It says 2 inches and 2 inches. Set my saw at 2 inches and it should just nip that side off beautifully. Alrighty, now let's go ahead and we know— and what you can do also is like, I usually mark these. I didn't on this one, but the X lets you know which, which is your square corner. It lets you know this is a 90-degree. This here is a cut side, so we don't want to mark that with an X. So this is a 90-degree. So now I can use that X again to cut off this right here. So to cut that off, Go ahead and measure. Inch and a half. Okay, so There you got your little resin tugboat. Those are our push blocks. And here's your block. Now this block is about perfectly square. Now it didn't go in square— well, it went in pretty square, but it's 1.5 inches by 2 inches by 4¾ inches, exactly what we put it in there basically as. So let's go So I'm gonna go ahead and, um, I'm just gonna nip off the ends, then I'm gonna just lightly sand it, just clean it up. Then we'll spray it and you can see, and we'll be able to see how good a job we did as far as casting. So I'll take it to the chop saw and I'll just cut these ends off. So this is kind of funny. Um, if you remember, whenever I was putting this block into the form, I wrote up on there and we got it out We cast it and cut it out so precisely that you can still see the P and a little part of the U on up. So that's a good job. I'm happy with that. So let me clean it up and then we're going to spray it. Alrighty, I got her cleaned up.

Just ran the random orbit on it.

It is a beautiful job.

There's no voids.

Now see this orange line here? That's because this here block When we initially, for some reason, we ran a roundover bit on it. Oh, I know why, because it was a huge block and we couldn't get it into the vacuum chamber. Um, I couldn't get it in the vacuum chamber when I was initially stabilizing it, so I ran a quarter-inch roundover and it gave me just enough relief to get it in there. But whenever I cast it, of course, and cleaned that up, it filled that little roundover. And then when I brought it all down and cleaned it up, it left that little orange line.

So that's what that is there. What I'm going to do, I'm going to sign it and date it, and then we're going to spray it.

And then if you, you know, comment, subscribe, and share this video, of those people that do that, you'll be entered into the drawing to give away, and we will send you this block.

And you can either use it as a paperweight or you can chuck it.

Or you can make knife scales out of it or do whatever you'd like.

So let's go ahead and I'll just sign it here, say what it is. So I signed it.

Okay.

All right, now let's see how pretty she is.

Maybe stand it up if I can do it this way.

How pretty that is.

Absolutely perfect casting.

There is no bubbles in it, no voids.

And that's how you do your own casting. So it's really not that hard. You guys can do it if you follow the steps that I laid out to the best of your abilities. It's really not that hard.

Anybody can do it.

Um, if you're doing it for knives or anything like that, just get you a pressure pot. They're not that expensive. $300, $400 will get you a good one, and you'll never regret casting with pressure. Instead of trying to use a torch to get the bubbles out. There you have it, guys. Buckeye burrow with orange resin. Thanks for watching.