Using Epoxy for Wood Cracks

Let's take care of the crack that has shown up around that knot right there. I'm gonna do that with epoxy. Now, one of the things we could do is simply put clear epoxy in there, and that doesn't look horrible. I'll show you some examples of that, but in this case, I also wanna take advantage of this to show you how you can color the epoxy to blend it in just a little bit. It's a very simple process.

What we're gonna do to get color is just do some sanding on the other side here. What I want is sawdust that's coming off of my material that's the same color as where I'm about to put the patch. So just with hand sanding so that I get the sawdust, I don't wanna collect it in a dust collector. I'm gonna do some hand sanding on the knot on this face. And then as we start to get sawdust, we wanna keep that.

If you've got a piece of scrap, you could be working on the scrap. But notice, I really am concentrating on the knot, not out here, away from the knot, because I want this brown color to come in. This smells really good. It's a beautiful piece of white pine, and I can really smell the pine now that I'm working on it here. All right, that's probably about enough for what we're doing.

Takes me back to my quantitative analysis chemistry days, moving the powder around like that. All right. This part, pretty straightforward. Standard off the shelf two part epoxy. We're not filling that large an area.

So, the economics of working with these little hypodermic type tubes are just fine. You do wanna do the sawdust part of this trick before you start mixing epoxy because this sets up pretty fast, this is five minute epoxy. So if I do this and mix it and then start going after the sawdust, I might just run outta time. Once that's mixed, then bring your sawdust in, and you can see the epoxy change in color with the addition of that sawdust. Now we're ready to go.

Using the Popsicle stick like a spatula in order to push that down in. And in the end, what I want here is I wanna leave the epoxy built up proud over the top of the crack. And the reason for that is, it's probably as it cures here, it's gonna continue to settle in. I'll show you an example of that in a sec. And so if I leave it proud, at the end of the day, when I start the cleanup step, I want the epoxy higher than the surface of the surrounding area, then we'll bring it down flush.

So if at this stage of the game, I just level it off, and then it shrinks or soaks in down into the crack, I'm probably gonna have to do another coat. Let that sit. But let's look at some examples that have already been taken care of. Got two of 'em going on this one. In this case, this epoxy was mixed with sawdust.

Over by the knot it was not, it went on clear. We're gonna finish both of these, and you'll see the difference. A couple of ways we can take care of this. One would be with a low-angle block plane, and just cutting right across the top of that epoxy in order to level it. And once I'm close, I'll finish it with sanding.

Sanding is the other way to take care of this. We can do the whole works with a belt sander or a random orbit sander. Big deal here is, to just work the entire area. What I don't wanna do is, rock over the top of this, because we do have a high spot here on the epoxy. So I wanna make sure I hit that high spot and bring it down, not rock back and forth over the epoxy.

In the middle of the board here, that's the crack that I mixed the sawdust into the epoxy with. I do think that's a little less visible there. I think we got a better mask out of that. On the knot, I did this one by just putting epoxy directly into the crack. And I think as a result, you can still see a line right there where the crack was, although it was filled with epoxy.

So two different approaches. For me, that doesn't bother me much. I think that's just a part of the wood. It's gonna come out looking okay, but you can pick which one of those approaches is gonna be best for you. Now, let me give you an example of this building it up because it's gonna go into the crack idea.

This is the top of this table. And I've got a significant knot on here. The epoxy's dry, that's been in there for awhile. But looking at this, this is gonna need just a little bit more epoxy. Because what happened is it did settle into the crack.

And as a result, we've got a surface down in here that I think is gonna be below the surface or this knot. So, before I do my next step, I'm gonna add a little epoxy right into this valley to make sure that it's high enough. Then when that's cured out, I'll come back and sand that down flush. Epoxy is a great way to take care of these little cosmetic problems so that they look a little bit better, and whether you color it, or put it on clear, the result is much nicer, I think than having the crack show.