Thread: Making Micarta Scale Material

Now I start placing clamps.

The first clamp goes dead-center in the middle.

Start to tighten it only a little bit at first and only very, very, very slowly at that. Aim to get this clamp only ‘finger tight’. The reason for this is that the layers of cloth, saturated with resin will initially want to slip and slide relative to one another. If you try to apply too much pressure all at once you run the risk of the pieces of cloth sliding away from one another in all directions, thus spoiling the lay-up.

Now start adding additional clamps.

Once again, the rule is 'not very tight' and 'very, very slowly'. Don’t crank down on these with hand power right now, instead keep thinking of just going for ‘finger tight’ on each clamp.

You will also find that as you add each clamp and tighten it up a bit, you will have to return to clamps you previously placed and tighten them up a bit as well. This is because the stack of cloth is very gradually squeezing out the excess resin which is allowing the stack to reduce in thickness at the same time.

Yet additional clamps are added.

Softly, softly is still the rule. Go for finger tight and don’t forget to evenly tighten up all of the previous clamps again.

This is it, folks. I’ve got nine or ten clamps in place and there just isn’t room for any more on this tiny bit of real estate.

Again, go around and tighten the clamps, bit by bit. But this time gradually increase the pressure up to the maximum you can reasonably apply by hand. If you look carefully, you can see that the wood has flexed under the pressure of the clamps so that the very outer corners are bowed down towards the stone. Were I using two pieces of wood (instead of one slab of stone topped with wood) I would be much less certain of ending up with a flat result from the pressing.

That is all there is to it for now. We are going to leave the lay-up under the pressure of the clamps for the next 24 hours.

And at long last the epoxy is cured, the clamps have been removed and the final result is revealed. That clear plastic-looking fringe is all of the squeezed out epoxy.

What do we see? Well, for one thing, the end surface color has become a blend between the yellow, cream and orange. However, since the orange is the strongest color of the three it is taking precedence in the mix.

I sanded off one of the edges and gave it a very quick buffing. You can see some of the striations which I think will add interest once the Micarta is turned into a set of scales.

The final thickness did, indeed, spec out to about 2.2 mm on average. However, I noticed some unevenness in the thickness of the Micarta and I think that is due to the plywood bending too much under the clamping pressure. For future attempts I shall make a thicker, composite wooden pad to serve as the top of my press. That should minimize the variations in thickness to a degree.

Now that the process has been explained and illustrated from start to finish, some of you may be wondering about the economics of making your own Micarta.

Let’s tote this up, starting with the materials.

The cloth is the big unknown. Either you buy it new from the store like I did, or else you raid the rag bag for some fine cast-offs. I will arbitrarily set the cost of the cloth I actually used at no more than 2 euro.

Epoxy-wise I used 45 ml of parts A & B together to make this particular sheet of Micarta. I originally purchased 1500 ml of the epoxy at a cost of approximately 53 euro ($75 at current exchange rates). Doing a quick bit of math, I figure I can make perhaps 30 pieces of Micarta of similar size using the resin at this rate. And that would put the cost of resin per pair of Micarta scales at about 1.75 euro ($2.50).

Then there is the cost of a disposable brush and disposable gloves, plastic mixing container and a couple of sheets of that silicon treated baking paper. I’ll add in 1.25 euro for all these things together.

That brings my actual material costs to around 5 euro (about $7.15).

Finally, we have the actual time spent on doing the cloth cutting, lay-up and clamping. This whole thing took me about four hours. But only about twenty-five minutes of that was the actual lay-up. Most of that time went into preparation in the form of collecting and preparing the tools and materials as well as documenting the process and setting up the camera and taking pictures. Normally, I should be able to get this all done in slightly more than an hour. So we can throw in the charge for one hour of work on top of our material costs.

All things considered, I think the cost for creating one’s own custom Micarta scale material is very reasonable.

Also keep in mind that for the purposes of this demonstration I have kept the Micarta fairly simple, but there is no reason why you cannot explore all sorts of special creative options. You can fold the cloth, weave it together or twist it. You can also embed such things as colored threads, string or even small bits of metal or wire. You can also add coloring materials to the epoxy (!). Feel free to experiment and enjoy yourself.

And now to start working on a set of scales. But that is best left for another article.

- Ignatz

That's probably the most interesting thing I'll read at work today!

Excellent documentation and authoring, ignatz. Looking forward to seeing that blade in the finished scales.

Forgive me if you already covered this but do you prefer one wooden press for that little flex over two stone ones? Not sure if I'll ever actually try this but it sure seems more simple now than if I had thought about making micarta a month ago.

I'm not exactly sure about whether two pieces of stone would be a good idea. The stone is fantastic for the base of the press, but as I might decide to make slightly different sizes of Micarta it is much easier to make one or two different sizes of thick wooden pads rather than cutting lots of chunks of stone. But we can always experiment, right!?

Outstanding, and SO helpful! Thanks so much for taking the time to put this together. Very very cool.

Chris L

Very nice job!!!! I have seen some tutorials on some other sites and they looked like they didn't care what they were doing. Your process was clean, very clean. I liked the breakdown of cost too. Put things into perspective.