The vacuum's purpose is to suck all the air out of the material allowing the resin to seep into every pore throughout the whole piece. No you don't need hard vacuum but you do need that negative pressure to be constant for hours. A shop vac while a great tool isn't designed to be run under load continuously for that long. I doubt you would make too many blanks before you burned the motor up. Yes the bucket trick works, or even mason jars can work for smaller blanks but I wouldn't suggest skimping on the pump/vacuum. I'd rather buy one pump designed for the purpose than a new shop vac every few pieces/batches I made. Of course if you only plan on making one piece/batch and know you won't mess it up, then using something you have laying around already may can get you through. It is a risk though.
As for not using a vacuum at all, that might work for thin stock that you might make a pen/mechanical pencil out of but a big thick block for mod making probably won't penetrate all the way through without the vacuum. Maybe if you milled it out first, but then stabilizing it could slightly change dimensions and cause different problems.
The sponge is an interesting idea, although you really don't need anything to soak up the resin. You could just make a solid block of resin as the blank. You could even make a mold and fill it with resin to waste less material. There are full resin mods out there. You could make really anything out of the stuff like your own custom drip tips, pens, vape build stands, tables, your imagination is the limit.
So this is a business now? You’re talking about manufacturing the stuff professionally? Of course not. Im talking about A piece, not hundreds.
It doesn’t NEED to penetrate all the way through if you rough the object THEN soak it. People are actually making bricks out of this stuff then machining our the entire thing? What a waste of material. And time. Wood is much easier to deal with if it’s not plasticized first.
As for solid blocks of resin, there are issues. Resin is fragile, prone to cracking, and all together just not a particularly good plastic. The only advantage it does have is it’s a cold process, so you can suspend stuff in it easily. The wood serves the same function as the fibers in fiberglass (also a resin material btw). It makes it stronger and reduces cracking.
If you want a piece of solid plastic just buy a piece of lucite or something. Cheaper, easier, faster, higher quality.
Resin is basically a type of glue more than it is a form of plastic. Look at Japanese lacquerware. That stuff is made of paper stabilized with laquer. Lighter and stronger than resin for that matter. Ancient oriental lacquerware is basically “stabpaper”. Countertop laminate sheets are “stabpaper” too. The plastic they are using is the same stuff they make pool balls out of. I’m forgetting the name. Really old school stuff. It needs heat and pressure though.
away”, and didn’t bother getting into the particulars.
