Better Boat Resin Demo and Review [VIDEO]

 Video Transcription

Hey everybody, in today's video, I'm going to be trying out a new resin. This is Better Boat epoxy resin. The people at Better Boat actually reached out to me and asked me if I would try out the product. So I didn't pay for these. They were sent to me, but I did check online the pricing, it is $20 for this 16-ounce kit, there is eight ounces of the hardener, eight ounces of the resin, and the shipping was very reasonable. It was $3 and 50 cents. So for the kit you're looking at 23.50. It came with the resin and the hardener like these things do. And it came with this super handy instruction pamphlet thing. So I'm going to go through all of this, break down the stuff that's relevant to us, and then go ahead and give this stuff a shot. And before I even get into that, I want to kind of do like first impressions kind of things.

The hardener is not bad. The resin itself is very thick. I mean very thick. And if you've watched my other demos and reviews, you'll know that I don't like a thick resin. I feel like too many bubbles get trapped inside of it. I'm used to working with a much thinner product where bubbles aren't so much of a problem. And even with the thicker stuff, I have a vacuum chamber so I can usually get the bubbles out, but even then it's really difficult. So right away I don't really care for that. So maybe, and I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe when I mixed them up, it will heat up enough to where the bubbles will be really good about rising and popping on their own. And I actually voiced this concern to the people at Better Boat when I got the product that I might not review it well because of the thickness and there might be bubbles.

And what they said was, go ahead and give it a shot and use a torch across the top. So I got a torch, which is a handy thing to have. I didn't have one and it was pretty reasonable too. It was like $13 on Amazon. So I'm going to be using a torch for the top of this. I'll leave the link for this and the resin and everything we'll be using in the tutorial today in the description box below.

Now I'm going to go ahead and break down the stuff that's relevant to us in these instructions and try not to blind you with the glare here. Okay, so materials needed. Some of this stuff is not relevant to us, like the squeegee or the brush or whatever because we won't be putting this on a table or a bar top or anything we'd have to spread it on. I'm just going to be working with some molds like I usually do for the demos and reviews and then I'm going to be using, this is just a magnet I started and I have a vinyl cutter, so I just cut out some letters and put them on there and I'll be filling up this part of the magnet with this resin today.

Determine amount needed for each coat. There's a breakdown of that, so that's handy. Prepare the surface in the work area. Okay. Measure the resin and hardener. Now this I really liked, there is a part that they included that I really appreciate. So measure one part resin to one part hardener by liquid volume. Okay. Or a hundred parts resin at to 83 parts hardener by weight. Now I appreciate that they incorporated weight into it because I've gotten a lot of comments before where people are like or you could just weigh it because you know I measured by volume and the thing about it is, yes you can absolutely weigh it, but just because it's one part to one part volume does not mean that it's going to be one part to one part by weight. It doesn't work like that and it's because one is significantly thicker than the other. They don't weigh the same thing. It is not a one to one ratio if you measure by weight.

So with that said, pour into a large clean, dry, smooth sided mixing cup. Okay. Pretty standard resin stuff. Add the resin of the hardener for optimal results. I personally, I don't like doing that and it's because I prefer pouring the thicker one first because then it sinks to the bottom. It's just a personal preference. Do whatever you want, follow your heart, so on and so forth. Okay. Mix the hardener and resin, mix both parts together for a minimum of three minutes. Break the sides in the bottom. Standard resin stuff. Okay, remix the hardener and the resin. Okay, so just pour into a second container. I've always found it to be a bit much.

I feel like you are totally capable of mixing it up as much as it needs to be mixed in one container if you're just careful with what you're doing. But for the sake of being, like I was told to do this, so I am going to do this. All right. Apply the coating. In this case we'll just be pouring it in here. Remove the air bubbles, hold the heat. Okay, so use the torch, hold the heat source, sweep it back and forth. Okay. Step eight, allow the surface to cure. Air temperature must be above 70 degrees in order for epoxy to cure. It's the whole heat thing. Heat helps epoxy cure, so they want it to be in a room that's at least 70 degrees.

Pro tips. So this one, I did go through all of this and I really think that the most relevant thing here is, when using this product to cast items, use thin pours of no more than a fourth of an inch. So usually, when companies tell me to do like a certain amount like that or like a certain thickness, I often wonder why. Now my theories are if you pour more than a fourth of an inch, there's going to be too many bubbles or the not going to be able to get out. My other theory is that if you pour more than that, it can heat up super crazy and ruin the project. So I don't know. Yeah, it's telling you not to do it. To be perfectly honest, I'm going to try it anyways. I'm going to fill up an entire thing and just see what happens. If things get crazy, it's not because of Better Boat's product, it's because I did not adhere to the directions. If everything goes well, then I'll take the very thick piece out and then I'll put it in the sun.

That's what I've been doing, is taking pieces like super thick pieces and then putting them in the sunlight and just leaving them out there to test the yellowing properties or anti-yellowing properties rather. So yeah, that's what's going to happen. Okay, so I have my gloves on, I have my cup, I am going to measure in, I have another cup to pour into and mix all of that. I feel like this is going to be hard to measure out because it's so thick or harder to measure than the stuff I usually do. It's I guess compare it to like it'd be easier to measure out water than it would maple syrup, if that makes sense. Whatever the case may be, I'm just going to start the pour so you get the basic idea and then I'm going to more accurately measure it off camera because I just do better when I'm not being recorded and it keeps my big head out of the frame. It always winds up in the frame somehow. So I want to avoid that this time. So let's go ahead and open it up. It has a very wide mouth. I don't really see that a lot in this type of stuff. Usually the bottle, the mouth of the bottle is much thinner, so that's definitely different. All right, so let's go ahead and at least just start to pour it in there. Yeah, that is so thick.

Yeah. I'm curious to see how the bubbles come out of this and I know you can heat up resin and make it thinner and easier to work with, but the instructions did not tell me to heat it up, so I'm not going to. If I was specifically told to heat it, I would, but I wasn't, so I'm not going to. Okay. Yeah, so you get the basic idea about that. I'm going to finish this up off camera and I will see you in a little bit. Okay. I have it measured in my cup and now I'm going to go ahead and start to stir it up and see how that goes. I'm trying to go super slow so I don't incorporate a bunch of bubbles in and I feel like this is going to take a really long time. So I'll do this off camera too and come back in a little bit when it is fully mixed. Okay, so I've been mixing it up about seven minutes now and I'm going to pour it into this cup right here.

Okay, so now I'm going to mix it up for a couple more minutes again in this cup and then I will be back and we'll get ready to pour the resin into the molds. I'm going to do one a fourth of an inch as suggested. I'm going to do with thicker one and then I'm going to pour some resin just into this magnet and kind of like dome it and take the torch to them and then leave them. And then we'll come back when it's time to check the hardness and the bubbles and all that jazz. Okay, so I'm going to mix this up. I'll be back in a little bit. It's all mixed up. Now I'm going to pour some into the first one and a fourth of an edge. Let's see. Okay, so that thick, that's pretty ... well. Okay. Okay. I'd say that's about a fourth of an inch. I'm going to pour a really good amount into this one. I might actually have to mix up a little bit more for that. I don't know. I'll come back to that. For now, yeah. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and just pour some in and then dome it into here and then I'm going to take my torch and run it across the top and I might mix up a little bit more in here to make a thicker piece, but for now I'm just going to focus on this.

All right. And I think I actually will have enough to pour into here. So I'm going to do that real quick. So now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take my torch and I'm going to run it across the surface of these pieces. Oh, that's crazy. I haven't used one of these before on resin like this. So I'm going to put these aside. I'm going to wait until they're all hardened up and then we'll come back to all that. And for this one, I'm just going to cover it up with the cup, so no debris or anything like that gets caught in it and yeah, I will see you in a few hours. Well, I guess 24 hours or I don't know. I'll keep track of how long this stuff takes to cure and all that. So I'll see you in a while. Bye.

Now that our first batch of resin has been mixed up and poured into the molds, I went ahead and I mixed up another batch to see what's the pot life is. I was reading in the instruction that after you pour it into the second container, you want to mix it for additional three minutes. Do not exceed eight to 10 minutes as a proxy will begin to cure. So that got me wondering what is the actual pot life. And for this little amount I went ahead and measured to the exact same amounts I did for the other project. It's a little under an ounce and so far it's been about half an hour I want to say, and it's still very workable. It's still very liquid. I think that maybe it could be up to 40 minutes for this small amount and the fact that it's a small amount does make all the difference though.

When you mix up epoxy it's a heat reaction. How it cures is it heats up and it hardens that way and when there is more epoxy, there's more product, it will get hot quicker. Like if this cup was completely full, it would get hotter and start curing faster, much faster probably than this smaller cup. So for a small amount, I think you have a pretty decent work time. For larger amounts, I could see it hardening up a lot quicker and you having to move faster. But I will keep an eye on this and see how long it actually takes before it becomes non-workable.

But now that we're back to discussing the instructions, there's a lot of helpful information in here. This is a big one. How to clean up. One of my viewers actually recently told me that you can use rubbing alcohol to clean up any resin spills that have happened and I gave that a shot this time for the first time and it works really, really well. So 99% alcohol to clean up liquid resin that you've made a mess with. I highly recommend it and I appreciate that this company included that in their directions.

I took the resin that I mixed up to test the pot time and I just poured it into this mold back here. The pot time for that amount in a 76 degree room was like 40 minutes. That caught me off guard. I was not expecting it to be that long. So that's what's going on there. So I'm just going to put that aside and let it do its thing. So now, we're going to start to check out the stuff that we worked on yesterday. It's been about 24 hours by now and here's what the magnet looks like. It looks good. It's hard to tell under these lights though, how many bubbles are in it. I took a picture out in the sun and I'll show you how that looks.

There a lot of bubbles. There are a ton of micro bubbles in this thing, but the design hides it well, so that's great. So now we're going to go ahead and pop these out. I'm going to start with the one that was the fourth of an inch ish suggestion. Oh yeah. I think I did actually manage to get it about a fourth of an edge. Let me see. Yeah, it's a little under. So now we're going to go ahead and check out the bubble situation with that one. There are a ton of micro bubbles. This is the issue that I have with thicker resins. I'm just used to working with a thinner resin, so there's just so many. And then I'll pop this piece out. It's not really relevant to us in this. Like I said, it's just for me to put it out in the sun and see how that works out.

But yeah, that's how that works out. It's comparable to other thick resins like Art and Glow and Pedulla look just like that. This thicker piece reached full cure in about four hours. I was really blown away by that. I was so tempted to take it out of the mold but wanted to wait to do it on camera. This thinner one took a little bit longer, probably about six hours. That's fast for full cure and it's very, very hard. It is a super hard cure. You cannot dent it with your nail. So I'm going to take the thicker piece, I'm going to put it out in the sun and I'm going to see how it performs as far as the UV inhibitors. That's just one of those things that takes time. So after, I don't know, about a month or two, I'll make sure to leave a little update in the comment or the description box below rather.

Based on how many of the micro-bubbles in it. I would not use it for the clear parts of things. Now, what's really surprising to me is that I would use this resin again though, and I probably will. I will order it again and here's why. I tend to use a couple of different resins for different things. Here's some magnets that I've made. When I want things to be clear, I'll use a specific resin. Like for this magnet, there's the clear resin. For this one, there's the clear resin, and then for this there's a clear resin and that's how you see the charms through it. But I pigment resin a lot. Like for this one, this part is pink. I used pink Mica. This part has glitter, this part has black oxide pigment. Even with this one, there's a black oxide in the resin pigment. I use pigments a lot in resin and with that type of thing, it doesn't matter if there's bubbles in the resin, it completely covers it up. You cannot see them through the pigments. And because of that, I would use this product and the reason I would use this product is because of how quickly it cured.

I cannot even believe how fast it to set up. With these types of things, you have to work in layers. You have to wait for one layer to harden before you can do another layer before you can do another layer and so on and so forth. So it's usually a waiting game. These things that were like you could poke them with a toothpick and they were stable enough, we'll say, to hold another layer by ... like for the thicker piece, it was probably about an hour, I want to say for the thinner piece, it did cure slower because it was thinner. A couple of hours, I want to say, you could add another layer, like you could work with it again and start to build layers on top of it. That is very, very quick.

Even the other products that I use, like I used Amazing Clear Cast for the pigmented parts of these. Even with that, you have to wait probably about five or six hours before you can put another layer on there. So yeah, because of that, I will use this product instead of buying more Amazing Clear Cast. I'm going to start to buy this instead because I can work on things quicker. You still have to wait, resin is a waiting game, but the amount of time that got shaved off is really remarkable. So to really sum that concept up, I would not use that resin for this part. I would use that resin for this part and will in the future. So yeah, I think that covers everything that I wanted to discuss. We did the demo, we reviewed it. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment section below. I thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.

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