Woodturning - Hybrid Pine Cone Vase with Epoxy Resin

Welcome back to my channel for another pinecone video and hope you are not bored me making pinecone projects because I absolutely love them. It is just so incredible seeing such a simple piece of material turning into an artistic creation by adding some resin and colors and obviously a little bit of creativity and you can make some stunning projects. So let's get to it. I mixed up some deep pore epoxy resin and I decided to go with red and green colors this time. I haven't used this color combo in the same project before so I'm curious to see what the outcome will look like. Once the resin was well mixed I let it to sit for a couple of hours just to start the chemical reaction so the temperature in the resin started to rise and when it reached around 35 celsius then I started to make my pore. This will reduce the colors to blend and form one single color and hopefully once all casted in resin we will see some sort of color separation and we'll see both the red and green coming back in our casting. Then goes into the pressure pot to cure which helps with air bubbles and does not help with the actual curing process. And a few days later it was demolded and it came out exactly how I wanted. I can clearly see the green and red coming back in the same pore so this experiment was successful again. And then with a bit of a transition we are in the new workshop. As I said before I have so many half finished projects which was filmed in the old workshop and then will be finished in the new one like this project. I started rough shaping with my negative rake carbide bits. It works extremely well on epoxy resin. Once the rough shaping is done I like to apply a little bit of an alcohol and it just reveals how the colors will come back once it's all nicely polished up and just look at that. Sometimes I have absolutely no plan for a project like this time. I'm just rough shaping this pinecone blank into a vase and I'm kind of making up the actual final shape as I go along with the piece and looking at how the pinecone is kind of revealing once I'm carving off some of the resin. And I also like to experiment with different shapes rather than going some of the more uniform shapes for a vase. Here just marking off the bottom end for the project and also when it comes to sanding it's nice to have that little groove at the bottom so I can send the piece all the way down to the very bottom. And the finishing touches with a negative rake chisel. Then going in with a forstner bit to carve out the inner part. And when it comes to a forstner bit a nice good quality sharp bit goes a very long way. I have been using this drill bit for probably one year and and used it frequently and I haven't sharpened it at all and it still cuts resin like a dream. Carving the inside of any piece isn't the most exciting part since you can't really see much, neither do I, so I will keep it rather brief. After a few passes I will be checking the overall wall thickness and this little tool makes a brilliant support to identify how thick the wall is along the vase. And you may see some smoke coming out of this project and it's nothing to be concerned of. That's purely down to the outside temperature in the workshop is around 10 degrees celsius so it's a rather chilly workshop at the moment and obviously as I'm doing the carving the internal temperature of the vase is rather warm or hot and just because of the higher temperature difference it just exaggerates the effect but nothing to worry about. And this is my sander stick pro 2000 which is a DIY sandpaper basically taped onto a piece of offcut and it helps me to get into some narrower hollow piece and I guess sooner or later it is time to change the sandpaper on this stick. So when it comes to finishes I like to switch between three different type of finishes which I normally use for a project and one of them is a simple epoxy clear coat resin which is fairly easy to carry out however it has its pros and cons. The second one I sometimes spray with a spray lacquer. Or the third one which is probably the most time-consuming however it's probably the easiest to carry out with the less of the risk something to go wrong and this is to send it all the way up to a high grit which is in this case will be 3000 grit and then after give a good old polish and buff to remove all the fine marks to give a very high gloss finish. As I said each of the finishes has its own pros and cons which I try to kind of summarize in different videos. This time I choose to send all the way to a higher grit since the actual piece had no issues with holes or voids so it was fairly easy to send all the way up to a high grit and then just give a good polish. So now after it's all sanded and removed from the lathe I will just do my branding hole and then I will go over to my buffing wheels and I will give a good buff and polish which will remove all the sanding marks and leave with an absolutely middle class finish. And the tape was only used for some protection in case I drop it or in case the tool touches the actual finished piece it hopefully will provide some sort of protection and you can't really see on the camera but there are still some very fine marks left on the piece so this three stage buffing wheel system will remove all those fine scratches. So I hope you enjoyed this week's project video it was a quick project because I'm working on some big pieces and still obviously building my workshop so I needed some time to focus on other parts of the the workshop to allow some new big machineries to come over the coming weeks which is well exciting so stay tuned thanks for watching and this project is also available on my website link in the description.