The final part of the process is to place the plastic bottle in the glass container and fill it with resin. I used a wire cutter to cut an old headphone cable to use it for hanging the sculpture.
I tied the cable around the plastic sculpture and made sure that it is tight enough that the sculpture can not fall off. I placed the knot on the side that has less resin so it holds the sculpture in a way that keeps the surface of the resin horizontal.
Then I tied the cable to a cardboard piece and placed it on top of the glass container to test its strength and height.
Before I bought the resin kit two weeks ago, I calculated how much I would need to fill half of the glass container. I used a volume calculator online that gave me the exact cylindrical volume. The height was 6 cm and the radius was 10.5 cm and the volume result was around 2 litres. And that is why I bought a resin kit that have a total of 2.25 litres.
After that I used a 1 litre plastic container to prepare the mixture with in two steps. I added 2 parts resin and one part hardener and stirred it intensively for three minutes and then added a bit of blue food colouring. I poured the resin mixtures inside the glass container and stirred gently till it became one cohesive blend.
Then I lowered the plastic sculpture down in the resin and found out that it kept floating back up when I push it down so I added few coins to give it some extra weight.
The additional weight kept the sculpture from floating upwards but the surface of the resin inside the plastic bottle was not fully horizontal.
I replaced the cardboard with wooden sticks and added another cable to the opposite side of the plastic container to raise that side slightly and make the resin surface inside more horizontal.
I noted the time and left it to solidify for 12 hours, but something unexpected happened. After few minutes the resin started to heat up rapidly and much smoke came out of the container. I immediately took the container outdoors and waited to see what was going to happen. After few minutes, the smoke stopped. However, the glass container was still hot for few hours after the reaction. The sculpture inside was not damaged by the reaction.
After that, I watched a video on YouTube about whether the resin will react if the mixing ratio was wrong. They conducted an experiment to find out that the wrong proportions of resin would indeed rapidly react. I made the correct measurements, so I have my doubts about that. But it could be anything such as the cables, the glass, the room temperature or even the plastic.
Result next day:
I am somewhat satisfied with the outcome considering all the difficulties. I would have liked it to be more blue and visible. The resin somehow separated it self slightly from the glass wall and the texture became blurry and green.
References:
Calculator.net. (2019). Volume Calculator. [online] Available at: https://www.calculator.net/volume-calculator.html [Accessed 2 Sep. 2020].
Cre_ Arth (2019). Resin Reaction !!! if you have a wrong measurement of catalyst ||| YOU MUST KNOW. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hxEwA6E4Q [Accessed 2 Sep. 2020].
MAS Epoxies (2020). Why is my epoxy resin hot and smoking? YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3q5opTXKm8 [Accessed 2 Sep. 2020].
Comments
Post a Comment