 Shark Hootery! Five years ago, I did not know what that word meant and now I don't throw a dinner party without one. Well, we just met up with a local artist Jordan Kodak who makes beautiful Shark Hootery boards and he's going to show us how to make one from A to Z. Hey, I'm Jordan Kodak and this is a how-to video of how to make a Shark Hootery board or at least how I like to make Shark Hootery boards. So it starts with acquiring a piece of wood. So first step is go to a wood place. I've got a few suppliers that I like to visit and pop into every now and then. Usually buy more pieces than I think I'm going to and spend more money than I think I want to but Yeah, I go there and find pieces that I really like and so I just, you know, buy a bunch. This could work, too. I like the ones that you know, it's a cross-section of like a large branch, like a slab style. I like more kind of the usable ones that you can kind of load up with your cheese and your meats and then, you know, that's kind of in the center of the table. Then it's, okay, let's turn this into something cool. So, you know, get to the shop. I've a CNC machine. It's fairly easy to understand technology. What it comes down to is just asking the client, you know, What do they want to see on the board? Coming up with a design on a piece of software called Aspire. That's what I use. The software itself Translates it into lines of code and those lines of code are what tell the machine to move when and where and how. You measure out, you know, where it's going to fit on the board itself. Essentially find the center point and then secure the board to the machine and then tell the software to run. That usually takes, you know, anywhere from five to 45 minutes to carve depending on how elaborate it is. I usually will practice on a test piece first just to make sure the board that I want to finish, that I want to get to a client. I've got everything drove down. I know exactly what's going to happen with it, and then, you know, we go and carve. So everything's ready to go. All I have to do is hit start, press play. Before I do that, I just flick a switch here. It'll power up the router and the shop back so they run together. But I do that first and then hit start, so it's going to get loud. So once you hit run you just kind of let it go. Make sure that it's kind of doing as you've told it to. I'll go off and, you know, start working on other boards, do other things. Just kind of keep busy while it's carving. Usually doesn't take too long. Cool. So we bought two cookies. We call them cookies because it's kind of in that shape. We bought two cookies, one black walnut. The other is a warming maple. Both very different grain profiles, and I think they show really well. All right, so we've carved the boards. We've sanded them up. Now it's just time to apply the art resin. I'm going to be tinting some resin for the letters on one of the boards. Another one's just going to get straight pure regular art resin. So for the warming maple, that one we carved up. It's a little more simple of a process in that you're doing less, but it takes more time to finish because you have to wait for the resin to cure. So we carved it up. I actually put a handle on that one. It'd be cool if, you know, this was something you could hold and carry. So I'm actually going to put a little handle on this one. So carved the handle into it and then resined it. This will be getting poured with our resin all across. So we'll mix it up. It's really easy. It's equal parts, partner and resin. Stir it for three minutes and you're good after that. Just making sure it's level. It's level now. It's good. It's ready to go. We've got a box made, so we can cover it up. Um, so we're good. It's ready to go. You pour it in there. It can be a little messy, so prep your area. Protect the area with a shower curtain or some sort of plastic. Just think ahead, have something ready to cover it with all that good stuff. So yeah, I just like a nice kind of thick coating, let it drip on the edge. It levels as it goes. So I'm really just focusing on getting a good, good coat on the edge. And then you just have to hit it with a torch so, you know, you get rid of all the bubbles. So we just covered it. We're going to leave that for 24 hours. Come back and check it. I'm going to have to stand off the drips on the bottom. It's fine. But other than that, it looks like it's good pour. Within 24 hours, it will look completely transformed by one coat. It's amazing. The one thing that I've noticed with pouring resin on wood is you do get some bubbling often times after you've poured, you walk away from it. It's been torched. It looked like glass. And then you come back and there's all sorts of little bubbles and specks and imperfections. The reality is, is that's just working with wood when you're pouring resin. So a lot of times you got to sand that down. I usually just, you know, throw an 80 grit on, sand it down. It'll not look good anymore. But the next time you pour resin on it, it'll just return back to kind of that glass state look that it has. It's great to use if you've got a board that has bark on it and you don't want to remove the bark, you want to maintain that look. Because once it's epoxyed on there, it isn't going anywhere and it's protected. It's not going to crumble off over time, gives a really good look. Once it is finished, it is food safe. You know, it'll give you that nice glass like finish. It really causes the grain to pop, makes the wood look great. So we bought one black walnut that we carved up. Once it's carved, I backfill the carve with our resin. You got one part hardener, one part resin, you just mix it together. Mix for three minutes. It catalyzes, pour it into the carving. That way no food or gunk is going to get in there. So a lot of times I get customers that want not a clear resin in the carve. They want, you know, a color. When you're resonating with tints, you mix up enough for the carve itself. As you're mixing it, I'll add, you know, some tint to it until you're comfortable with the color, the consistency of it, how dark you want it to be, that sort of thing. And there's just a matter of carefully pouring it into the carve itself. We're going to pour into the letters here. We're using multiple colors. We're going to over pour just to make sure that we get the right amount of coverage in each letter. You know, if we get a little bit of over pour and bleeding into the material, and that's OK, good or bad, we're just going to see how it ends up and hope for the best. After that's completed, just hitting it with a torch, get rid of any bubbles. I'm going to be sanding off most of the excess anyways, so I'm not super concerned with bubbles on that type of a pour. But still, you know, you just want to be careful not to over pour too much. And then it's a matter of waiting 24 hours. Once the resin is cured in the carve itself, you have to sand that down. I usually use an 80 grit to get it down just because it's more coarse. It'll move more material for you faster. After that, once it's kind of clear, now it's time to kind of really go to work on the wood itself. So I start with 80 grit, sand the entire board and the sides, get it kind of clean looking, and then I wet the board. It will raise the grain profile, actually kind of make it a little bit fuzzy to the touch. The next grit for me is 120. 120 will completely take off all of that fuzziness on the board and it will allow it to become that much smoother. And then, you know, through each grid, I'm wetting the board throughout in between. And then it's a matter of going through the grits. So move to 220, wet the wood, move to 400, wet the wood. So after 400 grit, that's the last time I'll wet it. I'll just quickly move through 600 and 1000 after that. By the time you're done, it's almost fully polished. I think a lot of woodworkers are spending a little bit less time on the higher grits. For me, it's what really transforms it. So I like going up into those higher ones. Once you're done at 1000, I just give it a quick wipe down and then I apply mineral oil. I usually do about two coats of mineral oil, really allow it to kind of soak into the board and really absorb. And then you can kind of see the end result when you get when it's really polished. It's like my favorite part. So the final stage is just applying a wood conditioner to the board. So this is a mix of mineral oil and beeswax. It helps condition and protect the wood, makes it food safe. It's good to apply this stuff once a month just because, you know, as you're cleaning the board, you know, some of this will kind of rub away and you'll lose kind of that luster over time. So when you've sanded a board up and you finish it with the the board butter, you kind of get more of a matte finish look, whereas with the R-Resin, it's a little more shiny, obviously. This requires more maintenance, whereas with the R-Resin it's protected, it's good to go. Really happy with how both turned out. I think you kind of get a feel for the different uses and applications of the product. And you've got to get a feel for the different varieties of wood. But at the end of the day, I'm really happy with how both turned out and I think they look great. So that's it. I hope you learned something. I hope you try it out for yourself. I love working with wood. For me, it's an outlet and it's a lot of fun. And I think everyone should have that thing that they do outside of work and outside of, you know, being a dad, being at home, we all need some creative outlet and this is mine and I hope you find yours. Rebecca from R-Resin here. While we're on the topic of charcuterie boards, I thought, why not take a minute and talk about food safety certification? We've said it before, R-Resin is food safe. And look, I have something to show you. This is a certificate with a big old pass sign right there. This is a test that we submitted to a third party lab. The test is called the FDA Food Simulating Solvent Extractives for Resinus and Polymeric Coatings. And basically what that means is the test involved getting a bowl coated in R-Resin and they do whatever it is that they do to ensure that nothing leaches out and that the products completely inert and completely safe if you were to put food in it and serve it to your loved ones. So there you have it. Now you can go coat your charcuterie boards with confidence.