Carving a 🐢 out of Epoxy & Wood

All right, let's get right into it. This is a 545 pound solid piece of buckeye burl. This costs around a thousand bucks and I'm going to chop it up and hopefully be able to get, you know, two or three sculptures from this single piece. I'm currently in the process of moving and that means that half my tools are at the new house and half are here and I cannot seem to find my stepladder which means it is at the new house. But I look down and I find this planer. It seems heavy enough and sturdy enough to stand on. I do not recommend doing this but you gotta do what you gotta do with what you have and it luckily worked out. I had leverage to make that top cut and here I get to open up this beautiful piece of buckeye burl. What I don't like about this piece right here is not only do the fins extend beyond it but there was a little bit of a void inside so I make another cut. This one looks solid and I just love the color pattern in it so we're gonna go ahead and use this one. The first thing you have to do when working with buckeye burl is take off all the bark and debris and all the cavities inside it. And here I am at the new shop. You could see just this clutter absolutely everywhere but I brought my burl over and it's time to start moving things around so I can put it on the table and start working on it. Once it's nice and cleaned up it's time to use some penetrating epoxy to seal the entire piece. I tend to go overboard when I do this sealing process. I will do two separate layers of penetrating epoxy over the course of two or three days and then on top of that I will do a tabletop resin which is a thicker resin to really seal everything in. I learned the hard way that a piece of wood will float to the surface if you just pour epoxy in there so my new method is I will pour a very thin layer of epoxy on the bottom, let that cure, and that'll just act as a clamp and it'll hold that piece of burl down for my main pour. If you guys have seen any of my previous videos you're familiar with me using dye for all my epoxy pours. I do not like the kind of yellowish tint of epoxy when it's straight out of the bottle so I will tint it purple and black and that'll actually kind of neutralize that yellow color and make it more clear with a little bit of a bluish tint to it. Once all the bubbles are degassed from the vacuum chamber it's time to do the pour and I use around eight and a half gallons on this pour right here. On this final bucket right here I noticed I had a pretty good size leak underneath this plastic so I luckily had some nice white gooey stuff to shove in there and block it up. A couple hours later I decide to go check on the leak and see if that's plugged up. I open up the fridge and I am stunned. The epoxy is already at 170 degrees Fahrenheit which means it is already reacting and the inside of the fridge is 72 degrees even though it's set at 50 which basically means my freezer cannot catch up with the heat that is off putting on this epoxy. I'm literally sitting here watching the temperature rise inside the fridge and I'm freaking out. I already see a couple bubbles in there. There's fractures and it is just looking terrible. It is now 95 degrees inside this fridge. This is an absolute disaster. Immediately put into crisis mode. I mean if this thing starts smoking and heating up it could literally catch on fire or catch something else on fire. I don't know if you guys have ever had a curing cup of epoxy start smoking. We'll amplify that by eight and a half gallons. That is a very very dangerous place to be in. Basically I just put a fan on overnight. I had it full blast right at it and here it is the next day. You can see just fractures everywhere. So the big question is why did this happen? I've done this before the exact same way and it's worked perfectly. Here's what I think went wrong. I accounted for the refrigerator temperature but what I did not account for is the sitting temperature of the epoxy. Now I keep this epoxy in my garage right here so that means it is the same temperature as the garage. When I pour this it was a 90 degree day and that is way too hot to start mixing epoxy. I think I mixed that 90 degree epoxy and it was curing immediately even though it's supposed to be a 24 to 48 hour cure. So I'm going to change this up on the next one. But before I do I had a really cool suggestion from a couple of you over on Instagram. They said to mix pigmented epoxy and pour into all these different fractures and it could have a really cool look. So that's exactly what I did. I thought that was a great idea. Thank you guys for recommending. I quickly ran into my next problem on this one which the problem just kept piling on on this one. I could not get it out of the fridge by myself. It's not the weight. It is heavy. It's around 100 pounds but it's the angle that it has to come out of the fridge. Straight vertical. So I knew this was a task for another day and luckily my dad was here the next day which, sorry pops, I hope you didn't pop your back on that one. Anyways we finally got it on the table and now I get to de-mold and I run into yet another problem. I did not put mold release in this mold. This has been an absolute disaster. I basically just scrapped this one completely. Someone actually came and picked it up on Instagram. I said come on over take it if you want it's yours. So I'm really interested to see what they did with it. In the meantime I am searching for a new piece of buckeye burl and I stumble upon this little one but this one really intrigues me. It has so many little angles and knobs and all these little intricate parts and to me this looks exactly like a coral reef. So I get back to work. I clean it all up. I do the three coats of penetrating epoxy and tabletop epoxy. I remake a mold this time solely out of FRP which is FRP fiberglass reinforced plastic. That sounds right. Fiberglass reinforced plastic. Yep. And I forgot to mention this time around I put all of the epoxy that I'm using inside the fridge for 48 hours beforehand. I had it at 60 degrees. That means this epoxy is 60 degrees when I'm pouring. You gotta be kidding me. Wow. The epoxy nightmare continues. There's bubbles leaking out of this burl and I don't know why at this point. I do have a theory that I'll share later but here it is the next day. Pretty much fully cured and again this should not be curing this quickly but there are just again there's bubbles everywhere leaking out of here. There is one point of happiness in this bad dream. I figured out a way to lift this thing up without any help. I got a little eyelet through it and a stud in the ceiling and then I got a little ratchet and I could just ratchet this thing straight up put it on the table all by myself. So here it is. It's actually a very good pour. It's crystal clear. There's maybe one small fracture but that could be worked around but there's just bubbles everywhere making this unusable for me. I am saving it for possible future sculpture but I'm not going to be using this for the turtle. So back to the drawing board. I get a new piece of burl. I do the penetrating epoxies and this time as you can see I am using a less aggressive piece of burl. This is what I think is happening. As I'm filling up the epoxy there are deep cavities within these intricate pieces of burl that do not fill up with epoxy. This is creating a big air pocket. When the epoxy starts to cure it off gases building up the pressure in these cavities enough to push out all this air. This is just a working theory. It makes sense to me so when this go around I'm going to back fill every single hole and cavity that I can find on this burl piece. Right now I am four weeks into this. I've used now 21 gallons of epoxy which is an absurd amount of money. I've almost diminished my entire piece of buckeye burl and I still don't have a carvable mold. Until now. It worked and it was a picture perfect pour. There are three bubbles in this entire piece right here and that is on the surface so it does not matter. No fractures, no cracks, crystal clear. I am beyond pumped. I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning unwrapping the biggest present. This is beyond exciting for me. Everything went smoothly besides for some reason the melamine on the bottom side did not want to release so I don't know what happened there. But we are ready for carving and like all my sculptures I hire a 3D artist Laura Mercado to do a 3D rendering and I use the profile overhead and underside views to help me out with my carving. So without further ado let's get to why we all decided to click on this video and that was to watch a carving of a turtle come to life. So I will be quiet now and just watch this this has been very very frustrating and this has taken three times the amount of time that it should have taken to get to this point but I can't really think about that. All I can think about is just cutting to the line and using my templates as guides to make the next cuts. I completely forgot about the melamine that was on the underside until I flipped it over so I got out the big chainsaw again and I just went to town and and hacked it away as quickly as I could. I'm really lucky actually that I drew the template lines slightly above this because I didn't even see the melamine on the bottom and it actually raised the sculpture you know three quarters of an inch and when I was doing my template lines I didn't even account for the melamine on the bottom so luckily I happened to make them three quarters of an inch above the bottom but that could have been a disaster in the making and that would have been pretty accurate with how this was going up until now but all is good so far just kind of carving away the bulk of the materials and I'm pretty much done with the chainsaw now I'm going to switch over to my angle grinder and this is when the mess really starts to happen. You really get to see the sculpture kind of take shape in front of your eyes when you're carving with an angle grinder with a very aggressive disc like this and you can see I wasn't kidding about this getting messy this is uh this is not like sawdust epoxy dust is on a completely new level and if any of you have ever worked with epoxy and sanded or done anything like this you'll know that it is a devil dust it sticks to everything it's electrically charged or has a lot of static so it doesn't just blow away and come off it is very very sticky it sticks to your tools it sticks to you it even sticks to the air hose that you're trying to clean things with so not a fun mess to clean up anyways to get back to the sculpture I am refining all the details I just traced on the turtle shell and I think the shell is really the highlight of this piece because it's so detailed and intricate and I'm going to have a smooth surface on top which means I'll get to polish it crystal clear I really wonder what my new neighbors think of me coming out of the garage in a full hazmat suit and mask on and moon dust everywhere they probably think I'm cooking meth or something hopefully they watch some of these videos and they see that I'm just carving a turtle that's all I'm doing here just carving a turtle nothing suspicious anyways I refine the head draw on the scales and then use my die grinder to kind of refine the shapes of the turtle head once I have all the details kind of carved in and close enough to how I want the finished product it's time to start sanding and I could still shape a lot with the sander but this is one tedious process one of the hardest and most tedious parts of this is actually inside the turtle shell all these little grooves that have little saw marks and and burr marks I have to basically hand sand almost all of these lines and here I switch to this small orbital pneumatic sander to really get into tighter areas that I can't reach with the big orbital and this is actually the first time I've used this UV cure stuff and it's actually really cool it's very much like epoxy but without the wait time I just get to put a little UV light on it and it instantly cures and then it's completely sandable like epoxy I'm actually going to fill a lot of holes with this here on out so it's a very cool product one of the difficulties in working with epoxy is if you want a crystal clear finish you have to sand all the way up to 5,000 grit so on this sculpture I went from 80 grit all the way up to hand sanding up to 5,000 before putting on polish and that really makes this thing crystal clear when it's finished and nothing has been more rewarding in my sculptural career than putting finish on this sculpture this sculpture has had so many drawbacks it has been eight weeks since pouring my first mold that didn't work and this is just extremely rewarding to put the finishing touches on this sculpture now that the sculpture is done it's time to start looking at display options I've had this piece of buckeye burl that looks like driftwood drying in my garage for almost a year with this specific purpose for this turtle I want this turtle to look like it's swimming upwards in a diagonal swimming motion and this thing is going to be perfect right here where I'm grabbing this this perfectly placed branch is actually going to be where the turtle is mounted on so I have everything kind of dialed in and I'm sanding it and shaping the edges to look like they are old live edges and to me this this is a perfect display piece it looks just like a piece of driftwood although it is buckeye burl and it is not driftwood it was sitting in the Fresno heat for years so it's just a perfect display piece and I can't wait to get this thing on there before we get to the big reveal I want to ask you guys what do you want to see me carve next let me know down in the comments I try and read as many comments as I possibly can and if you like this video please consider subscribing so you can stay up to date on all my future projects this sculpture turned out it's better than I ever could have imagined I love the pedestal and the angle the turtle is at and just the shell and that crystal clear epoxy I think really make this thing pop thank you guys for watching this video if you like it be sure to hit that subscription button give me a thumbs up and I'll see you guys next time