Carving whales from epoxy and wood.

Welcome, I'm Blake. Today we're going to be milling up some exotic wood. I'm going to be pouring 11.5 gallons of epoxy. I may or may not ruin this entire piece and chop off my arm with a chainsaw and we are going to create a truly one-of-a-kind sculpture. Stay tuned. The sculpture was commissioned by The Beacon, which is an event center located in Topeka, Kansas and has a bunch of different venues that you can rent out. This is specifically made for the founder's room. It will be displayed right on this fireplace mantle. Alright, let's get right into this. So I decided to use a lot of exotic wood in this sculpture really to bring it to the next level. I've never used half of these before but I'm super excited to try them out. I'm then going to joint the side and face of each board before putting them through the planer to make sure I have perfectly square and flat lumber to then stick on the table saw and cut hundreds of different sized pieces. Once all the pieces were cut down to size I still had to sand every single piece. This took pretty much a full day to do and was not too fun but luckily for you guys I fast forward through everything so you don't have to watch it. For this sculpture I'm going to be using a 3D rendering made by Laura and I will put a link to all of her social media accounts in the description. She does amazing work and when doing a sculpture like this it is absolutely crucial to have really good reference pictures so I'm so glad that I found her work and I'm going to be using her references as a template for this sculpture. I try and arrange these pieces so that two pieces of the same species aren't next to each other but I also have to account for the height of each slat. I don't want a lot of the same heights next to each other and I also have to consider the epoxy level and how much epoxy to wood ratio they'll be in the final sculpture so there's a lot more that goes into this than just lining up each piece. The finished sculpture is really being visualized as I line up these pieces. Next it's all about doing individual glue ups and this is what takes the majority of the time on this initial process. It's literally just using every single clamp I have and waiting for epoxy to cure and then milling everything down getting everything flat so I could then do multiple glue ups at a time. Bubbles are my worst enemy and something that I fear more than anything when doing these sculptures so in order to combat this I use moss penetrating epoxy and I cover not only the front side but the reverse side of every square inch of this sculpture or this I guess just pixelated pieces of wood right now and what this is going to do it's just going to seal everything in and make sure that no bubbles come out of the wood. Now I normally don't recommend trying something completely new that you've never done before on a project that's taken you a full week to do so far but you know what I'm just going to wing it here I feel like this is going to work so I'm going for it. I found this really thin plastic at the big box store and I want to use this as my mold for pouring the epoxy. Normally I use melamine and when I use melamine I do just a solid rectangle or square for my molds which means I end up wasting a ton of epoxy so for this I want to be able to bend the plastic and actually make a silhouette of the sculpture therefore saving a ton of epoxy. I literally have no idea if this is going to work let me know in the comments if you think this is going to work or if I'm going to have issues. If I do it's going to be a big problem but I'm going to silicone the heck out of this thing and use probably two or three full tubes of silicone trying to make sure I do not have any leaks at all. I'm also going to put these one by ones as bracing because what I'm thinking here is the epoxy is going to want to push these apart so if I put all these support beams on the outside and then put shims kind of pressing the sides in I think that will combat the epoxy pushing out. Again I don't know this could be overkill or this could be underkill I do not know at this point but we're going for it. I'm going to be using Moss Epoxy Deep Pour X. What's special about this epoxy is it can be poured up to three inches thick. There is not too many brands out there that you can pour a full three inches and this one I've had really good success in the past so it's really the only product I use. I did my very first pour inside the workshop because I was preparing for the worst case scenario and that is just leakage all around this mold or the mold breaking. I did have one small leak that I used some flex seal paste and this is the only product that actually stops an active leak. I will put a link to that in the description. I then bring the entire mold inside the house for a couple of different reasons. First there's a lot less dust inside the house. Second this is completely temperature controlled I have it at 68 degrees with an overhead fan directly above the mold which is crucial when doing thick pours. The last and not least I have Bruno here checking to make sure the mold isn't leaking when I'm not around and he also keeps me updated if there's bubbles that need to be popped. And if you're worried about our newborn sleeping next to this giant tub of curing epoxy don't worry we don't even really like him that much. Now I pour this in layers because you can only pour three inches at a time. If you end up pouring more than three inches you will get an exothermic reaction which means it will get way too hot and will fracture the majority of the piece. If not it'll cure too fast and you'll have a ton of bubbles dried up inside the mold. I waited another five days after my final pour to make sure everything was fully cured before demolding. I gotta say this plastic has worked unbelievable. It not only comes off fairly easy but it did not even budge at all. Besides one minor leak which I could easily get using melamine this thing worked out flawlessly and I will be using this for every sculpture here on out. Now all that's left to do is to find the whale that is hiding inside this massive block. One of the hardest part of these sculptures is just getting started. It's super intimidating to make that first cut but I've learned that you gotta just do it and go for it because if you don't and if you're scared or too worried it's just not going to turn out good. So without further ado let me quit talking and let's watch this whale come to life. I wasn't so lucky on day one but here on day two my hazmat suit finally arrived and now I have the face mask and the full getup and I gotta test it out for comfort and durability and we're putting this thing to the test. And here it is the very first cut in my brand new suit and check it out. Not only do I almost break my sculpture in half but I've got this chainsaw on full blast and it nearly just took off my arm. Maybe the round two will be a little bit better let's check it out. And you know what round two still really terrible but you know what I didn't have a chainsaw so that's a plus but you know right now I'm regretting my my life decisions and purchasing decisions because I think I have the most unlucky hazmat suit on earth so maybe don't hit that link but on second thought maybe do hit the link I get a little benefit from it so help me out here folks come on. For real though the problem was actually just those terrible plastic sawhorses those things collapse all the time I had those in the middle of the walkway actually for you guys I have way better camera angles when I have it there so I basically put my life and this sculpture on the line for you guys so hopefully you guys like this video give me a thumbs up give me a subscription because I may die. Now I always get asked what do you do with all of these off cuts well let me show you. For commissioned sculptures like this I always like to give the client a little something extra meaningful to go along with the sculpture just as a thank you and something cool because it is a cut off from the actual sculpture. Let's see how long it takes you to figure out what these are. Did you guess it right? Let me know in the comments. All right let's get back to the sculpture. After the bulk pieces are cut off using the chainsaw I switch over to my angle grinder with Arbortech turbo plane. This takes off material super quick is really aggressive and really nice to work with. Look at all these scraps here you see it actually just like shaves the epoxy and wood and creates these really cool chips. After all the proportions were how I wanted and all the details were carved in using all the various tools it was time to sand everything down. I sanded from 60 grit all the way to 5,000 grit wet sanding and this took a very very long time. Now that the sculpture is complete it's time to start working on the base and how this thing is going to be displayed. For that I knew it was going to be super complicated but I have the perfect guy for the job Alex at Under the Water Design. Say hi. Hi. That's Alex. So the master plan was to tape a level on the side of the whale when it was upright in the position I wanted. From there we could flip it over on its back make that level perfectly in the center again. This would mean that we could drill a right angle directly down into the curved surface. So Alex made a little jig here so we have a perfectly straight drill hole on two points on this whale. While I was carving the whale Alex was working on this slab of bastoni walnut to use as the base. He first cut everything down to size before milling up the wood from the joiner and planer making sure everything is nice and square and flat. Then he used his good old-fashioned hand plane which he loves a little too much to get even a nicer finished surface and you'll really be able to see the figuring in this bastoni walnut here. Check that out. Then he added some leveling feet made custom out of walnut and inlaid with a threaded insert. Pretty fancy stuff if you ask me. Before putting some finish on and then chiseling out the name plate and CNCing it out of brass. We finished this thing up by tapping some steel rods and threading them inside the base and now we're ready for the big reveal. I am beyond thrilled with how this sculpture turned out. It turned out way better than I could have ever anticipated. Everything from the presentation to the execution everything went flawlessly and I can't wait to give this to the client and let them see it in person. I'm Blake from BM Sculptures. If you like this video please consider subscribing.