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Test #2 was even better, just a few voids from the bubbles where they were deeper. Will try one more time with @gee-dub's suggestion of a propane torch. I do notice the sharp inside corners of my template are getting rounded by my bushing. The top and side look OK, a little more natural even, but the bottom is somewhat misshaped. I might make a new template for final product. -
A light "brushing" with a propane torch flame will chase the bubble to the top rather quickly. I would play with this on one of your test pieces. It's one of those silly things you get a feel for pretty quickly but don't want to try for the first time on your "keeper". I find the "soft" flame of the torch to be more effective (and faster) than something like a heat gun. Just my experience. -
That's Marc's theory and this is what it says on the Bessey website: My two cents is that compensation for bar deflection is impossible just by toeing in the jaw a fixed amount. For starters, the bar changes length. That's sort of the whole point of them. You can't solve the problem at one end of the range without creating the opposite problem at the other end. And you can buy them anywhere from a foot to 8 feet long but they all have the same jaw angle. Also where you apply the load changes how the bar deflects. If you clamp near the bar you get far less deflection than if you clamp out at the end of the jaws. It's an impossible problem to solve this way. Also my collection of original Bessey parallel clamps are all more or less square. They were clearly aiming for square on the first generation. So my theory is that their manufacturing process has some slop to it. They cannot make them all perfectly square without coming up with a very expensive new manufacturing process. People who buy the most expensive clamps on the market are exactly the sort of person to get out a square and check them all and return them if they are not perfect even though being toed in or out half a degree doesn't affect their function at all. This is very expensive for the company. So what they did is make them purposefully not square, and toed in is better than toed out. Then they tell you it's not supposed to be square and it can vary by a full degree (1 to 2 degrees) and this is by design. Nobody has a 1.5 degree machinist's gauge to check them against anyway. It's brilliant. Somebody got a massive bonus for that one. They solved the problem by making them WORSE! If they really wanted to compensate for bar deflection the place to do it is with the plastic covers all the new ones have. You could make them in different angles for whatever you needed and color code them. The clamp even has a place to store an extra one on the top so you wouldn't have to go looking for them. But instead I have 12 12" Revo Jrs and every single one of them is toed in so much that it is utterly impossible to get them to become parallel parallel clamps and I have to be the one to design an angled cover to slide on to compensate for this nonsense. -
By wtnhighlander · Posted
Sounds like a good outcome. I have done a couple of small epoxy inlays similar to this. If you find a bubble or void that got past you when you start carving and sanding, it works well to fill them with a dab of 5-minute epoxy, especially when using the black pigment. -
My first test turned out better than I expected. The epoxy was hard today and a few minutes with the ROS cleaned off the excess without issue. The epoxy does however have lots of little voids, I assume because it was too thick for air bubbles to escape. I went ahead and cut a shallow slant through the closer part of the face (the "Z") using a tall fence on the table saw and sanded a gentle curve with no issues. I put some tung oil on it just to get a feel for what it would look like finished and am happy with the result if I ignore the pits from the voids. For take 2, I got myself some pourable epoxy and some black pigment. Much easier to get into the letter, though I did learn two lessons: (1) level the piece first - I was able to level as I poured, but could have saved myself some stress leveling the piece before the pour (my bench is pretty level but not perfect), and (2) I need a heat gun to pop the bubbles that came to the surface (a lot more came after I took the photo). Will probably buy a heat gun tomorrow and do a 3rd test before I commit to my process.
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