Stained Glass Projects on Your Scroll Saw

To color the resin, we are going to use DecoArt Americana acrylic paint which can be purchased at most craft stores. Many polymer resins react and won’t cure properly with water or water-based paint mixed in, but Envirotex Lite will work fine with the small amount of paint we will be using.

Different colors of paint will have varying amounts of opacity but with most colors, 2 to 5 drops of paint per ounce of mixed resin should be enough for a semi-transparent look. If you want a solid fill, you will have to chose an opaque color and use a couple more drops per ounce. You can find an opacity chart for DecoArt paints on the web at https://shop.decoart.com/content/Americana_Opacity_Chart.pdf . This will help you chose the right color for your goals

You will want to chose a design that doesn’t have any scrolled veining lines since the resin may not be thin enough to flow all the way into the veining and your project may not turn out right. It is also worth noting that you should not use a porous wood such as red oak since the resin will flow through the pores which can be a little messy as shown in the following figure. This is should not happen with white oak, but to be safe, it would be best to use a tighter-grained hardwood.

Before you begin with the resin, you must make sure your scroll work is properly prepared. If you have planer marks, tearout, or any unevenness, you will want to sand that off. The resin flows very freely and will leak out anywhere that it can. You will also want your wood to be a little thicker than your desired finished thickness since you may have to sand off 1/8″ of an inch or more of thickness after your resin hardens. Once your project is sanded, you can clean the dust off and begin covering the back of it with a layer of packaging tape. A good brand of thick packaging tape will be much easier to use for this than cheap stuff.

Be sure to not get any ridges or bubbles when you lay the tape down.

After covering all of the holes you will be pouring in, you can use the edge of a plastic card all over the tape to be sure it is stuck to the wood everywhere, especially where it overlaps another piece of tape and where the wood edge is thin.

Next you can mix the resin as per the manufacturer’s supplied instructions. Be sure to use measured equal parts of resin and hardener and mix well. Halfway through your stirring, I recommend you pour the mixture into a second clean mixing cup and continue stirring. This ensures that there is no unmixed resin along the walls of your cup when you pour. After your resin is mixed, add a few drops of your color and stir it in thoroughly.

Now place your project in a foil tray in case of leakage, and begin pouring your resin into the fretwork. You may want to put something under the project to keep it up off the base of the tray in case you leak a lot of resin. If you are careful, you can pour the resin very accurately and not make much of a mess. Try not to get any on the outer edges of your work piece as you may have a hard time getting it off later. If resin drips down the side of your mixing cup, wipe it off to prevent it from dripping where it isn’t wanted.

Pour until your fretwork is full or almost full, but try to avoid having it overflow if possible. The only real problem with overflowing is when the resin drips down the side of your wood in a place that will be difficult to sand later. You will have to sand the whole piece down to the lowest point of resin later so fill all your fretwork as much as you possibly can. If you have any really sharp corners or narrow cuts, you can poke around carefully with a toothpick to be sure there are no air pockets underneath the resin. Just don’t poke a hole in your tape!

After the resin sits for a few minutes, you will see a layer of bubbles forming on the top. You can help get rid of the majority of these bubbles by doing a quick pass with a small propane torch. (Important: Be sure to follow all appropriate safety measures when using a torch!). Set the flame quite low and be sure to pass over the resin quickly so as to not scorch your work. Keep a little distance and don’t touch the flame to the resin, as this will cause a layer of skin to form. 

Very little much heat is needed to burst the bubbles and if you wind up heating the wood, you will actually introduce more bubbles into the resin by expanding the air in the wood. You can repeat this in another half hour if you think it’s required, but you may not need to.

After you are done sanding, you will still see occasional small bubbles in the resin. This can’t be avoided completely, but you can make them much less noticeable by blowing the dust out of them with compressed air. If the dust is stubborn, you may need to poke it with a pin to loosen it up.