For the Love of Epoxy

I love epoxy. Right now I'm favoring Gorilla Glue's 5 min Epoxy. I use it when gluing super magnets on to the back of my Tesla Finger Puppets and I just used it to attach hardware to the back of a piece because I thought a screw might do some damage.

Here's the piece. It was mounted on foam core at one point, so I needed to cut and spray paint a similar-sized piece of Baltic birch and glue the art (also a piece of Baltic birch) onto it with a heavy dose of wood glue. I like Titebond III glue for this part of the project. I lathered on a thick layer of glue and basically weighted the art to the background using big honking books until it set.


On the flipside of the background, I glued on a frame for support, made out of 1 x 1/4" pieces of oak trim. Now comes the epoxy part. I was concerned that the hardware screws were too long and might poke through the trim and the background and totally ruin my day. I decided to try epoxy. To keep a nice clean edge, I taped the area I wanted to avoid, applied the epoxy, then ripped off the tape before the epoxy set. Here's a before.

Here's after showing off my nice clean edges. Having work properly framed and looking finished is part of putting forth a good product, so with a little effort even the back can look good.

Now my piece is hanging at Hyde Park Bar & Grill in South Austin with 23 other Savage originals--it's up until January 12, 2013, btw. The epoxy was a perfect solution. I would have felt itty bitty screws insufficient for the project--besides, I really didn't feel like making a trip to the hardware store.