Hi all! I’m working on a coffee table for my Product Design and Technology class in my senior year of high school, and I’ve got a few concerns with epoxy resin, a feature part of my work.The setup: The top tier of this coffee table (and the only part we need to worry about here) is a slab of hoop pine, cut in half and the live edges faced inward. Clear epoxy resin with a slight teal tint will be cast between the two slabs. I’m looking at between 10 and 18 liters of epoxy resin. Because epoxy isn’t very good as a structural support, I’ll have a 5mm sheet of Perspex rebated into the lower part of the sheet.My questions / concernsHow can I prevent cracking during the curing process, and what causes it?Is there some cheap way to heat the enclosure the unit will be in during the curing process? The resin I’m working with has a full cure time of 10 days, and it might cost more to run the air conditioning for that long than the actual epoxy kit!What do the numbers on certain epoxy kits represent? I see some kits with numbers in the titles (glass cast 50, clear cast 1000, etc.)How can I prevent dust from getting onto the epoxy during the curing process?I hear that epoxy resin can generate a lot of heat during the curing process, would this melt my Perspex rebate? Will it burn the wood?This one is a bit less salient, but how can I ensure that my cast is the same color as the Perspex rebate? I want the whole thing to be the slightest tinge of teal, but if I get clear Perspex and cast a tinted resin, the distinction might be very noticeable.Any help is greatly appreciated! Cheers! via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2LiBaaM
