They’re pretty straightforward, three layers of hardwoods, Walnut, Cherry and Kiaat with a resin “river” in the middle. I had to make temporary dams to make a reservoir for the resin and slightly overfill, because the resin shrinks as it cures.
The base is a custom design made out of walnut, acrylic and cherry with 0.2" acrylic “arms”, the edges of which were sanded with 600 grit paper to make them frosted. I like the effect.
The river is transparent enough. It’s not perfectly transparent, but it’s pretty good. You can read through it, that was all I was going for. The slight opaciity is consistent and feels intentional.
Bonus pic: this is the project when the resin was being cast, you can see the temporary reservoir structures. I would never consider doing this without a belt sander to remove the excess material when the resin is cured.
How did you remove the resin that extended beyond the edge of the circle? That seems like it would be hard to sand down and maintain the correct curvature.
Likely because acrylic is a resin, but bonding pre-cured pieces to dissimilar material perfectly and permanently is tricky. Using the uncured version is perfect.
You can buy glass-clear epoxy resin, it’s often found on boxes or table tops, for example, with interesting knick-nacks underneath. You can buy it at the hardware store.
Edited to add - the way I would have made these is to place the “top” sides of the wood pieces face-down on a sheet of mylar with weights on top, dam up the sides, then pour in the resin. We used to make RC model wings and tail surfaces with resin-impregnated fiberglass, aramid or carbon matt between sheets of mylar in a vacuum bag. When cured, the mylar peeled off cleanly leaving a gloss finish. Like any kind of sticker you buy - even band-aids…
I was going to be sanding the wood face of the coaster so it didn’t matter if there was a little bit of surface texture on the resin.
Tape worked really well because it seals easily and you don’t have to worry about putting any weights on it or anything like that… even putting weights on the surface of the small coaster would’ve been difficult because I needed to put some sort of a dam on top to allow for overfilling.
In the end this worked perfectly. If I were to change anything it might be to try to find some other way to adhere the reservoir structures to the coaster. I used hot glue out of convenience and the fact that it sets almost immediately, but it gums up the sanding discs and belts more than I would like. I thought of using CA glue but I wasn’t sure it would fill the gaps completely since it’s so thin.
Wasn’t being critical of your approach, just responded to SQW asking why you didn’t use clear acrylic inserts, and how I would do it based on my work with composites and resin.
I did some stuff with Lichtenberg figures where I did something similar, I filled mine with WBPU, with a GF-cut “dam” that I attached with wood glue and subsequently cut away with the GF. I rarely keep stuff I make and didn’t take a pic of it, but I might make another for someone else and document it.
It feels awfully solid. I haven’t tried to break one… I have a prototype I made that I guess I could try to snap. It’s not apples to apples though because I didn’t sand the internal edge of the prototype, and I think it may bond differently to a lasered surface versus clean wood.
My gut says it would bond more poorly on the lasered surface so if I do snap that one in half I would think that the result on the clean wood would be a little bit stronger.
