My Experimental River Box

Hi all, I've been experimenting with resin lately and finding it very interesting. After a lot of mucking around with molds etc, this is my first lid insert combined with Coolabah Burl. The rest of the box is all Australian Red Cedar. I've now made a couple of molds, one for this size, and another for smaller boxes. I've got my second lid insert finished and I haven't even started making the box yet. This morning I also poured my 3rd lid insert, which will turn out very much different to these. I leave them in the molds for 5 days to cure.

Then after that a heap of sanding on my homemade drum sander. The second lid insert in the pics still needs a lot of sanding and then a heap of polishing after the box is finished.

Paul

Beautiful work as usual Paul and resin and burls always look good together.
You are the father of inventiveness. Do you use your burl flattening jig to rough the pours down to rough size before putting them through the sander?

Thanks Dallas, I've been researching resin for the last few weeks since I went to a custom made furniture shop not far from here and seen this lovely table (price tag of a few grand) with big cracks in the table top filled with black resin. Wow, that looks amazing so it got me thinking. My burl slices are about 15mm thick. I pour the resin to the top of the burl, hence when its removed its all about 15mm thick, resin everywhere. I put it through my home made drum sander and it doesn't really take that long to clean all the resin and burl and get it down to 12.2mm. By then its totally flat, any bumps and lumps on the burl all gone. But of course a lot of sanding scratches all over it. I take it down to 12.2mm as when I get around to cutting the panel frame for the lid insert, I make it 12.2mm also. When glued and clamped that gives me .2mm to put back through the drum sander to smooth out the joints and get it down to 12mm, which is the thickness of all sides of the box.

With the fine wet sanding and then polishing, the lid on the box in the pics is just like glass. I wont do any more rivers, just go with the natural shape of the burl.

I poured another one today and pretty excited about it, will look totally different (redgum burl) with swirly blue resin. That will come out of the mold next Thursday.

Paul

Is your wet sanding done by hand or machine and is it over the burl as well?

Hey Dallas, a bit of both really. What I am finding is if you use say 800 wet and dry paper and rub it on wet just with water (after you do your drum sander thing) that gets rid of a lot of the scratches on the resin and it doesn't matter if the burl gets wet either. BUT what I am finding then is instead of using water I use my own mix of Danish Oil (you have the recipe) you are then getting rid of the scratches on the resin and also starting to bring the burl up very nice as well. I then probably would have gone up to say 1200 w&d and repeated. I did a lot of experimenting at this stage, using my Triton ROS and some micro mesh 125mm pads I bought from AutoCheap 1000 grit, 2000 grit and 3000 grit and applying some EEE SuperShine (which has a cutting agent in it), this was bringing it up lovely. I also tried some car polish stuff (that is designed to remove scratches in headlight covers etc) also worked brilliantly.

But the micro mesh pads when I washed them they fell apart,...hmmmm. Some weeks ago I ordered on ebay wet and dry 125mm discs ranging up to 3000, they havent arrived yet.

So its all experimental. but sure, it goes over the burl as well.

Paul

Great work on the box's . I have seen them on tables also but I like your take on the process with the box's. I was just wondering if you use a special blade to cut the lids to size. Was not sure if there was a special blade than did not hurt the resin.

Hi Woodtec, sorry for my delayed reply. I wanted to use my table saw on some resin today to see how it went. I dont need to saw any of those lid inserts like in my pics as my mold is the exact size I want, 280mm x 150mm. I had another piece of resin with some burls inside it, that I was experimenting with. Size 180mm x 95mm x about 15mm thick. On my DeWalt table saw I sliced it down to about 12mm thick. I used my 32 tooth general purpose blade and it did it pretty easy. Didnt want to use my 80 tooth blade. But boy, it sure makes a mess, resin chips everywhere.

Paul

Nice work Paul. The resin application is very interesting and I think it opens up another approach to make different boxes.