Wonder Woman Emblem - Wood and Resin

Our little Justice League / DC wall is coming along nicely. Thus far we've made a Superman and Batman emblem and thought it only made sense to do the Wonder Woman emblem next. The technique we used for this one is a bit different, however. We took a suggestion from one viewer who suggested we use vinyl as a backer when pouring the resin. We opted for contact paper instead. While it did work it also didn't at the same time. You'll see in this -ible as well as the video what happened and how we fixed it. Nonetheless, we were left with a perfectly good Wonder Woman emblem in the end. We hope you enjoy it or at least learn something with us along the way.

Materials you'll need

• Wood of your choice (we used cherry for this emblem)
• Epoxy Resin (any will work, we used Famowood Glaze Coat)
• Acrylic Paint (we used yellow)
• Vinyl backing or Contact paper (if you choose to try this method) if not, check out our other emblems
• Finish (we used spray on polyurethane)
• 3M Poster Tabs

Make sure you check out the video, it shows a bit more of each step than the images do. Please enjoy and if you make it or something like it, we'd love to see it.

The pattern was created in Inkscape using the bezier tool to trace the original Wonder Woman emblem. This left me with a nice line drawing of the emblem. I glued the pattern to the piece of cherry using a temporary spray adhesive.

Once the adhesive had set, I drilled a hole into each space that I wanted to remove so that I would be able to insert the scroll saw blade through the piece.

The pattern was cut on the scroll saw first. I removed the four inner areas using a small profile reverse tooth blade. Once I had the inner cavities completed, I moved onto the band saw and cut away the outside portions. This left some burn marks, most likely because my blade was dull, but this is easy to clean up with some sanding. One other thing to note; the outer lines could have been cut just as easily and likely better on the scroll saw.

We used a two-part epoxy resin, as we often do, for the pour. This again, is Famowood Glaze Coat, a bar/table top coating resin that works well for many other things as well. We use it often for casting and for filling in cavities as we did in this case. As far as mixing goes, just follow the instructions that accompany the resin you choose. We also added a bit of yellow acrylic paint to the mix as well.

The white sheet that we used underneath the emblem is contact paper. The idea behind this was to create a seal so the resin wouldn't leak out. In theory, this made a lot of sense. For our application it didn't work really well, but that was probably due to user error. Perhaps if we would have clamped the piece down that would have helped substantially. To halt the leaking somewhat, we sat some jugs on it to weigh it down. It did help, but there was still leakage.

One extra thing to note; the contact paper did release nicely from the back of the resin, so there is some potential there.

To fix this mistake we took the piece back to scroll saw and trimmed off what leaked. Whatever wasn't removed with the scroll saw was removed with sanding. You could hand sand or use a rotary tool sanding drum; which is what we did.

The finish we chose was a few coats of spray polyurethane. Depending on the type of resin you are using you may want to do a test piece to see if the spray will react with the resin in a negative way. We have had this happen before and the results are less than favorable.

We have found with all of these we have done so far, 3M poster tabs work great for hanging them on the wall. They aren't very heavy so there really isn't an issue.

Aside from the mistakes this still turned out pretty decent and we learned some things along the way. Most notably, how to fix a resin pouring mistake.

We hope you enjoyed this DIY project and the video that goes along with it.
If you have any questions or comments please let us know, we'd be more than happy to help you out.

Thanks for checking out this Instructable.