I’m working on gift ideas for the holidays, and for one person in particular I’m considering doing some carved resin and wood jewelry. Has anyone had any experience carving into any particular two-part epoxies?
I haven’t carved detail into resin yet, but I have done a number of colored resin inlays on boxes. I use the x-carve to mill and skim cut the surface after the resin has set. I use west system epoxy and smooth on pigments.
If the resin doesn’t melt, you should be able to carve it like extremely dense wood. If it melts, treat it like carving acrylic.
The largest problem I have with resin is bubbles - take the time to use heat and/or needles to draw them out of the uncured resin.
After cutting, the resin surface is rough and dull. I use wet sandpaper, then plastic polishing compound on a dremel felt pad to polish the resin bits.
It carve rather nicely provided its the long cure-time / fully cured kind 
5min epoxy gum up real fast and generally fast setting epoxies should be avoided.
As long as the epoxy dont heat up it will remain “crisp” and behave.
Go fast
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This! Use good epoxy make sure it is fully cured and go quick.
I agree. Fast is better. Be careful if you are carving into mixed material such as the resin and hard wood. Here is a quick video I did a while back using 5 minute epoxy
Thanks, I’ll come back with any results in a while.
The only thing I will add is some resins and epoxies cannot be polished. You can smooth by wetsanding, but polishing is impossible (on some resins and epoxies). So, depending on the finish you want, you may need to consider that. You can always coat them with another product to get the finish you like, of course.
Can you use the same bits you’d use for hardwood