Hey everyone it's Dylan and Charlie from The Black Forest Wood Company
this week we're going to be creating five custom employee awards that are whiskey bottle castings
so this is actually a custom commission for Journeyman Distillery. We haven't done one of
these whiskey casts in a while I hope you guys enjoy and let us know what you think for these
castings. The clients have actually requested a solid walnut base to go in the bottom so that's
what Jack's placing in right now we picked some pieces of Claro walnut and it's very satisfying
actually the way they just kind of glide in there down to the bottom and then the next step of the
process is to just pour a really small base layer in the bottom of this and essentially the point
of that is to kind of secure that block of wood in place and then we can also paint some epoxy
on the bottom of the bottle just so we don't get as many air bubbles and put that bottle in,
to kind of hold it where we want it to go for the casting so this step is kind of critical
and important to make sure you get it all lined up the way you want it and then once this layer has
begun to cure and it's actually held that down we can then go ahead with the rest of the pour
once the pieces have sat in the mould for seven days they're then ready to be popped out and we
can actually start machining them sometimes you can pop it out a little bit sooner but i would
wait till seven days to actually start machining it.
one question we get all the time too is can epoxy be cut with regular tools the answer is yes we're using all the same blades knives and
cutters on our machinery here as we would if we were cutting wood the only difference that you
will notice is that the epoxy is definitely going to dull your blades a lot quicker so be prepared
to do some blade changing.
then once we've got our square reference faces on the outside with the jointer we can go over to the panel saw line that up to the fence and cut this through to size
another thing here that you'll notice which is common with all of our castings is our saw
blade isn't tall enough to actually cut them in a single shot so we just have to use a stop on the
other end of the fence and then flip the pieces 180 degrees and run them through a second time
once everything's sized we then like to put a small bevel on the outside of our pieces
it just makes them a lot more comfortable to handle and gets rid of that sharp edge
and then optically once they're polished up it kind of gives like this nice reflective
surface that just kind of adds another dimension to the castings i always think like when we put
a bigger bevel they almost kind of look like a gemstone or something like that
so personally i'm a fan of larger bevels on the castings but we always leave that up to the client
once we've got our bevel done then becomes the long extended sanding process so if you do not
like sanding, I would definitely recommend to not try castings because that's pretty much 50%
of the work or more on these castings our process for sanding begins all the way down at 120 grit
and we then work our way up to 4000 grit and uh i'm quickly going to run through
the stages so you know which grits we use so we go 120 150 180 220 320
400 600 800 1000 2000 4000 and then after all of those grits you're ready to move on to the
actual polishing stage so we just use a mini max polisher i forget where we picked it up but
it's a great polisher we'd highly recommend it we're not sponsored but we'd like to be
and then we're using the sia polishing compounds to actually build up the sheen on this which we
do sell those we do offer the sia compounds on our website and i think they have like a fine a medium
and a heavy cut so you would start at your heavy go to your medium and then for the final grit you
would use your fine and that's actually going to remove a lot of your scratches from the orbital
sander that were created and it's what's going to give you that full nice clarity in the piece
and of course the final step after all of this would be applying the black forest ceramic coating
you can also use the graphene coating it'll actually give a little bit more durability but
that is a step you're not going to want to skip when you're doing these castings because if you go
and do all that nice work to polish it up without a coating it will be very susceptible to scratches
on the bottom of these, we've got custom plaques for the employees that these are going to be going to
um so those are just aluminum plaques that have been laser etched on there and of course
we've used our black forest deep resin we've polished these and we've applied our black forest
ceramic coating all right well I hope you guys enjoyed seeing our process of doing these castings
we don't show as many of the castings anymore because we were kind of worried
that you guys were maybe getting a little bored of them but we still do a lot of these
castings all the time we're having people reach out for things they want cast like
i think right now the next one we have coming up is these like antique soda cans tab soda
cans they're very old and very rare or something and we're casting them in a pyramid so that'll be
coming up soon but you can order all the supplies that we use to make this off of our website
let us know if you have any questions too we're more than happy to help answer those and please
subscribe like the video and we'll see you next week charlie what do you think charlie hey