Hey everyone it's Dylan from the Black Forest
Wood Company we're back again me and Charlie for another week here in the shop uh we've got
something a little bit different this week right in front of me here i've got three different
kinds of epoxy so starting on the left is the cheapest epoxy we could find and then all the way
to the right the most expensive out of the three is our epoxy and what we're going to do is we're
going to pour all three of these resins in the exact same way with the exact same piece of
wood we'll cut from the same slab at least same thickness we're basically going to try
and replicate the conditions for all three and we're going to see how they pour and how
they how they come out so to give you guys some pricing for reference on what we're working with
here i'm going to break the pricing down into a dollar per litre uh that's usually how we price
things out when we're trying to compare epoxy so the Gorillapoxy on the left there works out
to 26 and 15 cents a litre the pourable plastic worked out to 29.94 liter usually the smaller
containers you'll end up paying more per liter and you'll see that with our resin so this is
a 7.5 liter kit it is 41 a liter that it works out to so more expensive than the other two for
sure but we're going to compare and see how they how they perform one thing to add i guess with
our resin if you were to buy a 30 liter kit your cost is about 33 bucks a liter so you
get it down a lot closer to these epoxies but obviously you need a use for 30 liters so it
would require that if not you are going to pay more but let's jump right into this we'll mix this
up and we'll see how they we'll see how they work right charlie all right so for these pours here
uh for our test pieces with these epoxy brands um we're actually going to use our offcuts
and that is a question that we get all the time is what do we do with our offcuts so this
is kind of like our off cut corner i guess and we end up recycling all of it and
putting it in the store eventually but we can also pick from here if we're making art
pieces coffee tables anything kind of smaller so picking from our off cuts we need one that's long
enough to get all three of our 18 inch pieces so I think we need like 54 inches in total that should be plenty long enough there so we'll
grab that guy out and we'll chop it into three all right so what I'm doing here now I'm
just ripping these down a little narrower just so that there's a little bit
more room for epoxy in the bowl since we are trying to test how the epoxy cures
here I'm gonna cut this down a little smaller than I usually would so it might look like
a lot of epoxy but that's just for the test so then we're going to do our same debarking
process that we always do which starts with using a draw knife for the bigger pieces of
bark and then a wire wheel afterwards to clean off the cambium reason we do this is because if
you don't remove the bark or even the cambium like you can really see it on here this this
thin layer here this is the cambium that's what i'm talking about if you don't remove that the
epoxy will bond to this layer and not to the wood because this this layer is actually really good
at stopping epoxy from soaking through so then you have the chance of your table being able to
separate if you don't clean all that off so that's that's why we do this alright, so then in front
of me here I have got three of our reusable epoxy forms these things have been a huge huge hit we
released them i think like two or three weeks ago we've already sold hundreds of them literally
hundreds i think we have like 100 in pre-order um that for the order that just showed up today
so tim is going to be very busy shipping all those out we also sell pre-cut pieces of wood that
fit the different size of forms we have so if you're making your own piece uh they're really
convenient for that but today we're actually just going to use them for our test so here we go
we've got our three pieces this one has a little bit less epoxy in it than the other two but for
for testing um for for this test more so what's going to make a difference is the thickness and
all three of these pieces are the same thickness when you're pouring epoxy well what you need to be
careful of is the surface area to volume ratio so here we have obviously less surface area
but there's less volume and then here with the increased volume we're also getting
increased surface area so it kind of compensates for that increased volume and it's not going
to make it heat up any more on this pour than it would on that pore what
we're going to be testing today we have three different brands of epoxy and we
basically tried to find the cheapest epoxy that we could some of it i don't even think ended
up being all that cheap it was still kind of expensive i think this gorilla epoxy was a little
bit more expensive this stuff was super cheap it's called portable plastic two to one mixture
says good for pores up to two inches thick and this one was kind of weird because on the amazon
page it said it was good for pores up to two inches thick when we looked at it but on here it's
saying it's good for pores it says max thickness an inch to inch and a half so i don't i don't know
which one it is if it's an inch or inch and a half but we are going to be pouring it in here
today so it's a little thicker than what would be recommended i think for this product
but we do that with our product all the time and we're actually going to be doing it here today
because these are thicker than two inches thick and we're pretty confident that our product
will have no problem but we will see how these these other epoxies perform so i'm kind of
biased i'm probably going to pick the one well i was going to say i'd pick the nicest
piece with our resin but then i feel like you guys would say i'm picking the one with the least
epoxy for our resin so i'm going to pick the one with the most epoxy for even though it doesn't
make that much of a difference for our resin these are about the same let's go with
this guy here it's got a little bit more that'll really put ours to the test and then
the other two will be for the other brands final step that we need to do before mixing our
epoxy is actually clamp all these pieces down i found with these reusable forms you can actually
get away with just one clamp on either end there was also actually going to be a third resin
competing in this uh in these tests it's dr crafty dr crafty's resins i believe it is and we ordered
it off amazon it shipped it was supposed to ship directly from their warehouse i believe it never
showed up we got a hold of the company let them know that we didn't get it they acknowledged that
we then let them know that we wanted to use their product in a review online and we never heard
anything from them we never got resin we never got a refund so can't really stand behind
those guys we would have loved to try it but we never got the resin or a refund to let you guys
know all right so first off here we've got our pourable plastic that we're going to try um
i'm just gonna open this up so that is our resin yep and then this is our hardener i think
this might actually be the exact amount that we need we're doing six liters of each product so
it's pretty small pour it's not really a dining table size pour or even a coffee table size pour
but it should give us an idea of how they react now with any epoxy before like if you're doing it
in a production setting and you know you're going to make the switch to a certain brand i would do
all sorts of tests you know i wouldn't just do a small test like this and then decide to buy like a
600 liter barrel kit do something small then maybe buy a 30 liter kit try and do a test and then
if you're going to move into bigger quantities do it after that so let's start with our resin
in here we need four liters of this stuff uh the viscosity seems okay seems relatively
thin maybe a little thicker than our product but not bad the colour is good
there's good clarity in this, okay so it's only 36 to 48 hours to cure so that's
really quick I will be impressed with this product if it can pour thick with no issues that quickly
it wasn't quite a full four litres either so we're just going to dump the full contents of each
hardener is definitely a lot thinner so now we've got our pp our portable plastic now we've got
our GP our Gorillapoxy what kind of a g is this GP and we'll do our six litres so we've
got our a to b two to one this is the a so four liters of this pretty similar viscosity to
the other product so i don't know if you guys can see that but this does have a little bit different
hue to it um we need a little bit more as well so we've got our two mixtures set in the
buckets and now we're just going to mix them up see how they mix and we do have a degassing
chamber but we're not going to degas any of these epoxies just because most people
at home aren't going to have a degassing chamber so we just kind of want to make it
as realistic as we can so first thing i'm noticing here kind of right away that i just
put a mask on just because of the smell um is this stuff is definitely thicker uh it's
not mixing quite as easy as the pp the portable plastic um and it's got a little bit of like a
bluish purple hue to it i don't know if you guys can see that okay so one thing i'm noticing here
on the gorilla epoxy as well as it's got a cure time of 96 to 120 hours so that's a lot more
similar to our product um i would think that's a benefit for that product it should stop it
from overheating but we'll see how it works so first up is our pourable
plastic see how this goes now we're doing our resin black forest deep I hope it's gonna be enough all right and then finally this is the gorilla
epoxy so we got all three of those poured in we will wait now see how they cure up i'm gonna
come in here every little bit and check the temperature with the gun probably just record
something on my phone if anything crazy happens um they're all at about the same level we've got
almost the same amount of epoxy in these so we'll see how they turn out so we are going to use a
fan on these um we are pushing the products you know slightly past what their their labels say and
most people will have a fan at home and we would definitely even for our resin we'd recommend a fan
at this thickness so we will turn the fan on all three of them should be pretty equal and we'll see
how they fare so another thing i thought i should mention here just so you guys realize is i did not
take that much care in making sure that there was no particles of dust in here uh we're mostly just
seeing how the epoxies react so like in this one the pp1 like there's little specks of dust in
there those aren't imperfections in the epoxy same thing in ours we got little black specks
um lots of different chunks in there and this one's hard to see because there's
lots of bubbles in it but there is small little imperfections um but
that i guess actually might help us see which one's more clear whichever one
you can see the imperfections better maybe okay so it's the next day after pours here with
charlie we're gonna inspect see how they look so this is the pourable plastic it's at 22 that's
pretty good let's check for how cured it is and it's still quite soft as well
then we've got our resin here we're sitting at 21 22 degrees let's
check it it's still quite soft as well and then we've got the gorilla epoxy um lots of
bubbles i don't know if you guys can see that after we de-mould these we'll shine a
light through them so you can really see and let me check the temperature on this
one for you guys about 22.
Still pretty soft okay so one other thing I want to mention too all
of these resins are also getting the benefit of our aluminum cooled table so that's going to
make a big difference as well but actually, these all look not too bad right now not too
bad but we're still pretty early into the cure all right so it is monday uh we did these
pours on wednesday so it's been five days now since we've done them and everything is hard
enough now at this point to take out of the mold um so nothing's really changed too much since the
last time that i showed you guys just besides the hardness uh pourable plastic has tons of bubbles
unfortunately didn't crack didn't really overheat too too bad there's not shrinkage but there is
lots of bubbles then we've got our black forest resins um really clear we got a few bubbles just
right down here i think that's like our worst spot but overall looks really really good finally
the gorillapoxy not too bad honestly i was impressed by this one i thought it was going
to perform worse than it did because it's only rated to an inch to an inch and a half
there is still a few bubbles on the inside but overall not too bad another thing that you guys
probably noticed watching this is that our resin is actually the most yellow i guess out of the
three um this resin is pretty old we've had it in our totes for about eight months but one thing
we do know is our resin is formulated with the very high amount of uv inhibitors so this will
never get any more yellow than it is right now and when it's demolded out here it's going to
look crystal clear like glass we can't prove this but we do kind of have an inkling that
the other epoxies we used like this one here they have some kind of dye maybe already added
in to kind of negate any chance of yellowing maybe they don't but it almost kind of looks like
these products are just ever so slightly tinted so that if any yellowing does happen that negates
it now with that being said we don't ever really recommend doing crystal clear pores because any
epoxy product will yellow to some extent over a long period of time like when i said ours is not
going to get any more yellow than this i mean within the next 10 to 15 years but beyond that
it's a plastic product there's absolutely a chance it could yellow same goes for any of these epoxies
uh it just the difference is how long that's gonna take depending on how many uv inhibitors are in
there um so regardless i would just put a couple drops of black dye tint it ever so slightly and
then you're never even gonna see that yellowing so now finally what we're going to do before
we de-mold we're going to use our durometer and we're going to check the hardness on these
so this product had a cure time of 36 to 48 hours our product has a cure time of five to
seven days so maybe not quite fully cured and then the gorilla epoxy had a care time
of four to five days so it should be good so that's kind of interesting we have three
different cure times but they're all at about the same hardness right now definitely none of them
are what i would expect to be full hardness like for this being a 36 to 48 hour cure time i would
expect more than a 0.78 hardness i would expect at least like a 0.8 from that ours in about a week
from now will probably be at about .85 that's the maximum hardness it gets to and then this one um
i would expect it to get harder because you should have at least point eight for a tabletop epoxy
um but we'll check in a few days and find out all right so we've got some dust on the bottom
but we knew that was going to be in there pretty darn good you know let's very very clear pretty impressed with this overall actually really really really
happy like look in the edge yeah that's you can see completely to the other
corner really yep I can like see my fingerprints through the epoxy that is kind of crazy just
how clear this one is that's really impressive so that one was ours that's ours
yeah now we'll go for the PP wow okay so now you guys can really kind
of see those bubbles put my hand behind it can you see it then we'll take an edge look yeah so definitely a lot more bubbles in this
one um I'm not sure but this possibly could be avoided with degassing on some of these
but again we didn't degas anything here so this is naturally how our resins look we
still usually degas our resin um honestly we usually get more bubbles than this on
when we do like a big table pour I'm super, super impressed at how clear this one came out
but degassing on the big pores still can help so then we'll finally we'll
move on to the gorilla epoxy you can see him more now there's like five or six
bubbles maybe there's a few i don't know why this is red what that's so weird okay well that's something where we learned
for some reason the gorillapoxy turns red um so that that was really really strange there
what you guys just saw we turned the lights off shine the flashlight in and the gorillapoxy turns
red when you shine a light in um so i would say that's kind of an indication that almost for
sure there's some kind of dye in there or or something um but i don't know why it would
turn it red that that is a new one to me okay so that that was definitely kind
of interesting to see all those cured up in the beginning we thought that we're like oh
my god what have we got ourselves into these other two resins are looking great um they're
going to be just as good as ours but it's it's in that long term in the cure where things really
make a difference so off the bat they looked okay but now when we look at the cured
pieces it's really really easy to see the difference in quality in these resins
at least what i'm figuring happened here is that the less expensive resins generate a
little bit more heat than our resin does just a little bit and therefore it results
in some air bubbles coming out of the wood you can especially see it on the pourable plastic
it's right on the end grain here of the wood where it's exposed wood grain you can see all of those
air bubbles actually kind of attach to the wood so what happens is if your epoxy exceeds
a certain temperature if it gets too warm it'll actually start drawing the moisture out of
the wood which is then released in the form of air bubbles so that's why it's so so important to
keep your epoxy cold which we were able to do with ours generated no air bubbles crystal clear pour
um let's do a charlie clarity test hey charlie charlie come here come here come here okay he's
not going for it um and then in the middle the middle like those are probably the two extremes
in the middle is the gorilla epoxy but again same thing you guys can really see from the edge a lot
of air bubbles in there um probably get away with it if you're doing a metallic pour but anything
clear you would definitely want to avoid that so i hope you guys enjoyed this little comparison
here you know i really want to make it clear our goal here is not at all to slam these brands uh
i actually think there's probably still a time and a place for these epoxies if you're doing
these super pigmented pours if it's something for yourself and you're not so worried with
perfection maybe it's worth it to save a little bit of money but if you're like us you're
perfectionist and you want everything to be as good as it possibly can be it's pretty
obvious that our resin is going to be the best for that again no degassing there that's just
the way it cures careful mixing careful pouring um and it all works out quite well so i hope you
guys enjoyed this comparison that we filmed here charlie's freaking out because ben's at the
door but yeah thank you guys let us know if you want to see more videos like this give us some
feedback on this and we'll catch you next week