Aibote 1 Pair Diamond Honeycomb Pattern Resin Knife Handle Scales Handles Slabs Knives Custom DIY Material Tools for Blank Blades Jewelry Making (Green,120X40X8MM)

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Resin Fillers, Powders and Effects (optional) - In addition to colors, you can add a variety of things to your resin to give different effects, like glitters, metal powders, or just fillers designed for added strength. Here again, youll need to make sure that your filler is compatible with your resin. I want a kinda sparkly effect for these scales, so ill be using another Smooth-On product, Cast Magic, specifically the Silver Bullet variety

Remove cups from vacuum, add A to B, mix thoroughly, scraping the sides and bottom. If you dont mix everthing well, your resin wont cure properly, if you mix too long itll solidify in the cup. Know your pot life, make sure you have enough time! Time to talk tools. All said and done, all you really need for this is a resin to cast, a mold box to cast it in and something to mix the resin in, but im still going to bore you with the details.And thats it, youre done, you should now have a completed set of scales, ready to start attaching to a knife or whatever. The aluminium honeycomb is dead soft, it wont hurt standard woodworking tools, ditto for the resin. The resin itself you can sand, cut, drill, machine, whatever, even grind without too much trouble. You dont want to get it too hot while working it, its still plastic, but overall most castable resins are incredibly easy to work with. As far as longevity on a knife handle goes, well, unfortunately a urethane or epoxy resin handle probably wont hold up quite as well as something like G10, but its still a remarkably durable material, and well worth it for the looks.

Resin Colorants - Unless you want some really boring scales, or clear depending on the resin, you need a way to color it. Make sure that these are compatible with your resin! Incompatible colorants can cause your resin to fail to cure, not a pretty sight. Since im using a Smooth-On resin, ill be using their So-Strong colorants. These things are insanely concentrated, a very tiny amount will color a large amount of resin, so they go a long way (for reference, i use a single drop in this tutorial)

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Mixing Cups - I like standard paper Dixie cups from the supermarket, theyre cheap and disposable, plus a handy size. They also dont react with the resin i use, or the solvents i keep around (acetone melts solo cups, ask me how i know) Anyway, once your mold is ready, and assuming your resin is properly mixed, time to start pouring. The proper technique is to pour the resin in a stream at the lowest part of your mold, with an open face mold. Since we're casting a flat rectangle, the lowest point is anywhere. In this case, i like to pour in the dead center of the mold, at the same spot the entire time, and let the resin kinda flow itself out. This will let the resin seek out the little nooks and crannies on its own, forcing air out as it goes. If you just dump it everywhere all at once, air can get trapped. Best to let it flow out on its own, in my opinion.

Vacuum Chamber (optional) - Extremely useful for getting air bubbles out of resin so they dont end up in your casting. Im using a basic pressure pot with lid that i made to hook up to a basic vacuum pump. You can skip this without too much detriment, theres just more of a risk of bubbles Vacuum degass (optional). Place the cups with the resin components into a vacuum chamber, apply vacuum until the bubbling from the resin stops Now that youve got your mold prepped, time for rubber to hit the road and to start playing around with the resin. Slap on those gloves i forgot to mention you needed and lets get to it!Once your mold is filled, you have 2 options. You can either let it sit and cure, or you can transfer it into a pressure chamber to cure under, well, pressure. Curing under pressure is an additional step that requires some specialized tools, but results in massively better finished products. It does this by either compressing any air bubbles in the resin down to the point where theyre invisible to the naked eye, or by forcing the air to dissolve into the resin (think of CO2 in soda), depending on who you ask. How isnt really important as far as im concerned, just the results, so into the pressure pot it goes!