Posted by Sean H. on 12/1/2021 to
New Products
Have you ever noticed that people tend to treat their own stuff worse than their own? While working as a mechanic, it was a common trend to see talented and meticulous mechanics driving around in beat down and poorly cared for vehicles. Strange how that seems to work. Well, this is a tale of woe where I did the same exact thing when taking pictures of the new Hidgit Leveling Feet for the website. Instead of mounting something for someone else, I mounted one of my own posters and completely ignored my own lessons learned, and got exactly what I deserved. I have literally drafted a set of instructions on how to resin mount artwork and posters on plywood backers (forthcoming on the Hidgit website), and I decided that I would just skip a few steps to get to the picture taking. I was "multitasking..." (but not really).
Fun neuroscience fact: Humans can't multitask. Whenever I hear someone bragging about being a good multitasker, I always shake my head. Your brain doesn't work that way. You can do two things at once, like pat your head and rub your tummy, but not the first time you try. Your brain needs to make both actions into what neuroscientists call a "chunk" (I am simplifying here). Your brain can break up multiple tasks into a sequence of ordered events, some of which you may have already committed to memory through practice and reputation and don't have to use much brainpower for. But when you throw something new in the mix, watch out, as you are likely to get messed up. You might have made the same recipe hundreds of times, then one night you add in a new desert to the mix and you mess up something you have done hundreds of times with no problems. All this reminds me of one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande, which I highly recommend if you are a perfectionist nerd like me. I love getting things right. And this time, I didn't follow my own checklist and got them very wrong, so it's time to fall on my sword.
When I was looking for a demo piece to take some action shots of the Leveling Feet, I knew the perfect one. I had a "Demotivational" poster in my engineering office for years. Being a Gen Xer, I love dark and overly pessimistic humor and absolutely can't stand contrived motivational nonsense. The people at Despair, Inc are just my type of folks. I had their "Problems" demotivator hung in my office and it made me smile everyday. It had a beautiful picture of a huge iceberg floating though icy waters and looked just like one of those cheesy motivational posters found in pretense filled corporate offices everywhere. It read: "No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them." I'm chuckling just writing that. But how true. Most people breezed in and out of my office to ask questions and never paid any attention to it. Occasionally, someone would read it and make a funny face, a few even got the humor in it. Anyway, this demotivational awesomeness has just been sitting in my attic for years now that I don't work in a soul crushing organization and I decided it was time for it to make a come back! I was going to resin mount it on plywood and take pictures of the Leveling Feet at the same time. And this is where it went wrong.
*Image credit: Despair®, Inc. "Problems" Demotivator.
Tripod- Check. Camera- Check. Prep Work- sorta check. While it seemed that I had everything ready to go, there was just one problem. It is getting chilly here in Virginia and I had left my resin sitting in the corner of my office where it stays cold. Normally, if I were doing this job for someone else, I would hit the pause button and put the resin somewhere to warm up. But remember this was my poster, and besides, I had done this so many times before and never really screwed it up too bad. What could go wrong right? In my previous post I alluded to being a bit of perfectionist, but I am also the kind of person that itches a little inside if I pick the wrong checkout line at the grocery store. Being an impatient perfectionist is not a great trait combination at times like this. Pressing on with my multitasking effort was ill-advised but I mixed the resin anyway. It was clearly thicker than normal. As a result, more air got into the mix than usual (you always get a little air in the resin during mixing). No problem I thought- I will just use the heat gun a little more than normal to get the bubbles out. But these bubbles were different. They were small and almost frothy-like. And small bubbles are a big problem when doing a resin pour. Given what I was mounting, we now have sufficiently humorous irony.
Here is a little tip with some physics and trigonometry: All liquids are “self-leveling”, so all the resin manufacturers that market that as a feature are really just pointing out that their material obeys the laws of physics. But resin is a highly viscous liquid, and at lower temperatures it thickens and behaves more like a gel and won’t level properly. Remember that guy "Pythagoras" from your high school trig class? Of course you do. Well, according to his theorem, if you have a 24" workpiece and are pouring resin to a desired thickness of 1/8”, and it behaved like water, you would only have to be 0.3° off level to have no coverage on one end and 1/4” thickness on the other. And that is exactly why I made these Leveling Feet. But thankfully, epoxy resin doesn’t behave like water and its viscous nature makes it unlikely that you will have a completely bare spot once it is spread over a workpiece thanks to surface tension.
Back to the botched job, where I then poured and spread my cold resin all over the piece. Per normal, I let it sit for a while I deliberately covered some Leveling Feet with resin to grab a few snaps. Normally, when the resin sits for a while, many of the bubbles will rise to the surface all on their own. But when I looked at my piece, not only were the bubbles not moving, the resin wasn’t even leveling. Because I was messing around “multitasking” with my pictures, I began to worry that too much time had passed and immediately went to work with the heat gun trying to pop out all these little bubbles. When you add heat, the trapped air heats, expands, and rises to the surface while at the same time the resin gets a little thinner, helping get rid of all the air bubbles. The big ones came right out but the little foamy buggers (aka- "microbubbles) weren’t going anywhere. So, I kept at it, foolishly. The key is to go over the resin with short applications of heat and let it sit, then repeat as necessary. Heat will speed up the curing process of epoxy, and I was adding way too much heat, going from cold to hot (you want warm). Then I saw it- A big hardened chunky section of resin right on top of the iceberg. Damn it.
At this juncture, I could have recovered the job. And you could too should you find yourself in a similar situation. Don’t panic, just work out as many bubbles as you can and let it harden. Then you can sand it down to get rid of all the imperfections and do another coat. That is what you are supposed to do. But I was “multitasking”, so it was time to get really stupid. For some reason, I decided it would be awesome peel off my resin dam and pour the resin off the side so I could drop a bunch of Leveling Feet in it and get some great video footage of popping them out of hardened resin. I thought it would just leave behind a thin coat of resin that I could sand down after and that all the resinbergs would slide off. When I tipped the workpiece, I immediately regretted the decision when I noticed that the resin had hardened to its full thickness and was bonded to the print. It looked like a flow of resin icebergs over the top of a picture of actual icebergs. The ironic plot thickens (pun intended- and I’m killing myself).
Resinbergs! Oh noooo…! But man, look at the Leveling Foot surrounded by resin. And it popped right out of that mess!
It gets worse. In the back of my head, I was always thinking: “I can just get another one of these mass-produced prints and start over. No biggie.” As the resin was hardening on my three-dimensional iceberg masterflub, I went to despair.com to get a replacement poster. And it wasn’t there anymore! I emailed them to ask if it was just out of stock. Nope. It had been discontinued. No luck on eBay either. I couldn’t even find the image they used with a reverse image search. That’s when I realized that I really liked that poster. And this is why I never mount irreplaceable original works of art for other people. I was so mad at myself for being so careless. But instead of being demotivated, I got motivated and jumped into Illustrator to make a replacement. I paid for a nice-looking stock image of an iceberg, banged out the design, sent it off to my local print office, mounted it, put my resin in a warm water bath before coating it (no multitasking this time), and hung it. In my office bathroom, right where it belongs.
Giving your warm resin a bath in the winter months is a must. It will pour more like tomato soup instead of pancake batter and mix like a dream. Just do it.
Don’t let my careless mistake intimidate you from resin coating your own art or poster. Got for it. I got great results the very first time I did it with no experience at all. So, what did I learn here that I can share with you? First, don’t multitask. Monotask instead. Second, and probably most importantly, make sure your resin is warm before you start. Third, don’t heat up your resin too much when popping bubbles. Do one pass and let it sit for a while before doing another. And lastly, if things go wrong, don’t panic and just stick with the plan (and do some sanding). I hope this tale of ironic woe helps someone else do it better.
At least this story about icebergs ended better than the Titanic. It’s not the same as the original but it still makes me smile.
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