A little experiment

[ChrisA Edwards]

Not very exciting, but thought I’d share.


I'm making a set of cutting boards for a friend as a wedding present and so am going to do some epoxy inlay on the underneath.


This is my first time doing this, so I bought some Epoxy resin and Mica Powder.


I make most my end grain cutting boards from a combination of Purpleheart, Walnut, Cherry, Burbinga and Maple.


Not knowing how each Mica color would tint the epoxy and which would look best in the various woods, I made this test board and put 44 samples, of the 50 in the box. The two pictures are the top and bottom of the board.

Top

Bottom

[Paul F Franklin]

Wow, that was a lot of work! Saving the pics just in case.....thanks for posting.

[Jim Becker]

That was a really good idea to do that sample board to reference!

BTW, what was your source for the mica?

[ChrisA Edwards]

Got the 50 color pack from Amazon ($24) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Many of the colors are very similar, so I just filtered out 6 of them.

[Keith Outten]

Nice job on the test boards Chris and thanks for the link.

[Alan Lightstone]

Thanks, Chris.

Never thought of using Mica powder to tint epoxy. Could be a game changer.

[Jim Becker]

Thanks for the link!

[ChrisA Edwards]

This was my test board, had a Purpleheart and Maple end grain board, lying around that I never finished with.

So this was my experimental piece. I routed out the letters and the design with my Shaper Origin, 4mm deep.

The Bronze and Black epoxy didn't really stand out that well, that's when I decided to made the color swatch board above.

The green was a test to see if it was necessary to give the routed out section a coat of de-waxed Shellac prior to dribbling in the epoxy. The answer was yes. even though I over filled each green groove, the epoxy in the groove without the Shellac was sunken below the board surface, so some epoxy definitely got sucked into the end grain.

I did cut the two green grooves using a piece of Oramask stuck on the board. I wanted to see if it would stop any bleeding of the resin into the wood. That was successful on both the Shellac and no Shellac'd side.

[David Zaret]

great work - definitely saving that link and your photos for reference. thanks for posting.

[Jim Becker]

Chris, I think that you're going to find that for boards that you want to do inlay work, you'll want to go with a much simpler background. Mixing the woods with great contrast works well for non-annotated boards, but "busy" backgrounds are going to be a challenge for the inlay to have an even appearance. What you can do, however, is to consider doing like one of my clients does for charcuterie boards...leverage interesting material like ambrosia maple for interest while also using resin inlays for personalization. The general background, despite being kewel to look at, is stable enough visually so that the inlay is clear and clean.

[ChrisA Edwards]

Agreed, this project is for a friends Son who is getting married, so I don't plan to do a lot of these.

My other thought was to select one of the woods, being used in the board, and then do a 1/4" deep rectangular inlay of long grain and then route the design on that. I may try this on the other side of my test board.

My initial thought was to do the insert, but actually do the inlay piece with actual wood. I know this can be done, but I went the safe method with the resin. I may try this, on a sample, before I make the final cut.

The design will be on the under side and not on the cutting surface, although for all the cutting boards I've given to friends, no one has actually used them to cut on, "Be like taking a Ferrari Off Roading, you just don't do that" was one friends response.

[Matthew Curtis]

"Be like taking a Ferrari Off Roading, you just don't do that" was one friends response.

Yes, but it is a free Ferrari, let's see what it can do.