Pour
Like a catholic priest delivering the consecrated host, many a hobby craftsman preaches about the miracle conductive that is epoxy. But unlike many DIY shamans, I am probably not the most truthful follower of the holy silicon - at least not after the shock it left on me. We’ll get to that. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is really amazing. It can harden solid like a plastic rock and you may even get it to be as clear as glass. But there is much detailled attention needed if you want to get it right. So with that in mind, let’s get to it.
What you need
approx. 1m² of chipwood
body mid layer: thin sheet of wood at the size of your body blank
silicone in a cartridge gun
one of either: circle saw, jigsaw, bandsaw, …
a couple of screws
drill
hot glue gun
optionally: separation wax
If you’ve never worked with epoxy, let me summarize what it is and does. Epoxy resin is a kind of reactive polymer. It comes as two separate components, resin and hardener, which are both liquid. Once you mix these substances in the right concentration, the result will start a chemical reaction. While generating heat, this reaction starts to transform the mixture from liquid toward solid state. Once fully cured, epoxy resin (depending on mixing concentration) leaves a robust and hard surface.
As you may imagine, this stuff has a vast scope of applications. Just type “epoxy resin art“ into the search engine of your choice and get inspired for your next art project. Fact of the matter is, you can create a brick of almost anything using epoxy to hold it all together. Initially, it behaves almost like water. Therefore, even complex shapes can be cast. All you need is a sealed mold to prevent leakage. Inside of it, you lay out your content. Then you pour a whole bunch of the stuff over it and wait until it’s hard and clear. That’s the theory and it is how I started my journey down the road to epoxy.
The Mold
To start things off, I built a wooden frame to cast my mosaic of skate deck slices into. I just took a couple of pieces of chipwood and put a few screws in the right places.
At every corner of the mold, I made sure to seal the structure using silicone. I then covered the sides of the mold with a coat of separation wax. This way it would be easier to remove the mold, while preventing damage to its pieces, further encouraging reusability. Other tutorials I found online illustrated the use of plexiglass for building molds. Obviously, this material is a bit more expensive than chipwood, but it’ll separate from the hardened epoxy much easier and therefore offers a longer durability for your mold. Another way of providing easy separation is by covering your mold using tape. There is special epoxy separation tape, but some of the DIY community advocates towards using ordinary clear packaging tape.
One important realization that I had was, I would have to connect my epoxy casting with the layer of stacked boards. To determine a final thickness of the body blank, I was planning on using a thin sheet of plywood anyways. So instead of casting a brick of epoxy and somehow attaching that into the body composition afterwards, I decided to cast straight onto the body mid layer. Consequently, I attached this sheet of plywood at the bottom of my mold. Additionally, I made sure that the other side of it would be shielded from any leakage.
With the mold ready, it took a few half decent iterations to find a visually appealing layout for my mosaic. Most progress was made while I sat down in our kitchen, had some glasses of Whiskey, put on a bit of music and spent a laid back night puzzling around with skate deck slices. The intermediate result included a bit of griptape to pave a road of travelling skate wood slices. I asked some friends about the layout and received mostly positive responses.
Get Feedack
“You said you’d be making a guitar from skate decks. What’s all this epoxy griptape nonsense? Don’t make this a river flow project. Focus on the skate wood, because it’s rad.” - my homie Michael
Word. Michael was right and I enthusiastically ripped-off the pieces of grip, which started to bother me, too. Yet, I wanted to break the mostly vertical alignment of stripes. As a result, I arrived at my final design.
