Safety

Better to be safe than sorry

Samuel Lover – Irish songwriter, composer, novelist and portrait painter (chiefly in miniatures)

• Properly cured resin is not toxic. In every form other than fully-mixed and a solid lump, it can be nasty.
• The vapours while mixing can be nasty, like really permanent-asthma-inducing nasty. Work in a well-ventilated space. Wear a proper full-face respirator when working with resin if possible, but definitely if sanding resin objects. You’re looking fora 3M P100 filter or equivalent. Not cheap, but cheaper than a new lung.
• Always wear nitrile (not latex) gloves at all times when doing anything with resin projects. You might not get a reaction now, and feel like you can cheerfully fling the stuff about, but it’s quite possible to develop contact dermatitis through continued exposure. If you don’t care about your health, do it anway because resin is a bugger to wash off.

Preparation

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Abraham Lincoln – famous vampire hunter

• Resin is like oil. The smallest bit of it will seem to get everywhere and on everything. Cover your work surface with something, and cover a bigger area than you think.
• Have lots of dispoable tissues handy. Resin can get exciting, and messy, real quick.
• Many resin bottles and online guides say to gently warm one part of the resin (usually the “A” part) in warm water before mixing. They really do mean “warm” and not “as hot as it comes out of your kitchen tap, and maybe boil a kettle for good measure”. If the mixture ends up above about 25°C, it’ll kick almost immediately. I’ve had a 200ml batch (not usually enough to suffer from heat-related issues) kick in the first 30 seconds of sitting in the vacuum pot, mid-boil.

Bubbles

Life is mostly froth and bubble

Adam Lindsay Gordon – poet, horseman, police officer and politician

Perfectly designed and artistically placed bubbles are great. Random bubbles from mixing and pouring are not.

1. Use a vacuum pot to de-gas the resin after the two parts are mixed, but before it’s poured. Don’t put the whole diorama or whatever in the pot – the resin will expand and foam up, and whatever your diorama is made of might have air pockets in it too, and explode (probably not dramatically, but enough to ruin the model).
2. Don’t add resin pigments before vacuum degassing. I’ve found alcohol-based dyes in particular just love to boil off in the vacuum and create a glorious foamy mess.