Resin kits and equipment
Sorted by when you need it rather than by what it costs. Most of the craft runs on about the price of one gallon of resin.
You need four things on day one and they come to about $39: a scale reading to 0.01 g, graduated mixing cups, nitrile gloves and something to scrape the cup walls with. A torch and a spirit level come next, once you care how the piece looks. A pressure pot is $180 and only earns it for clear castings — and it does not remove bubbles, it shrinks them until they cannot be seen.
Almost every resin equipment list is ordered by what the writer owns. This one is ordered by when you actually need it, because the difference between the first four items and the rest is not a matter of degree — the first four decide whether the resin cures at all, and everything after them decides how it looks.
The scale is the one to be firm about. The ratio is a fixed property of the chemistry and not a recipe you can lean on, and the commonest failure in this craft is measuring in the wrong convention: 2:1 by volume is 2.20:1 by weight, about 7% out on the hardener. A $15 scale removes that entirely, against a gallon of casting resin at $90.
Then there is the pressure pot, which is the most misunderstood object in the craft and gets its own section below. The troubleshooting guide covers the failures this kit prevents, and the safety guide the ones it does not.
What to buy, and when
Prices are rough US midpoints for what a home maker would sensibly buy — the point is the order rather than the figures. Day one comes to about $39, the finish kit another $30, and everything past that is optional for most of what people make.
The three tiers
A scale, graduated cups, gloves and a spatula. Everything here is about the mix being right and your skin staying out of it, and none of it is negotiable. Uncured epoxy is a skin sensitiser and the sensitivity is cumulative. Nothing may happen for a year of bare-handed work and then a reaction develops that does not go away — at which point the craft is over for you. Nitrile gloves every time, including the pours you think are too small to bother with. Vinyl and latex are not adequate; the resin goes through them.
A torch or heat gun for surface bubbles, a small spirit level because resin finds the horizon rather than your table, and a box to keep dust off while it cures. This is the tier that turns a piece that worked into a piece you would show someone.
More than a gallon of casting resin, and worth it only if a single trapped bubble would ruin the piece. It has no effect on heat, on cure, or on anything at the surface — and it is the wrong tool entirely for a river table, which clears its own bubbles given hours to do it in.
What each one actually does
A kitchen scale reading to 1 g is not enough at small sizes. A 100 mm coaster cavity holds 79 ml, and a set of 8 takes 691 ml — at that scale a gram either way is a real share of the hardener. 0.01 g resolution costs about $15 and removes the commonest failure in the craft.
Graduations so you can check the volume against what you calculated, disposable because cleaning cured resin out of a cup is not a task anyone does twice, and WIDE rather than tall. A tall narrow cup is a deep pour in its own right: mass traps heat, and a quart of table top / coating epoxy in a narrow container can smoke while you are still stirring it.
A sweeping pass a few inches above the surface warms the resin, thins it, and lets the bubbles rise and pop. A torch is faster; a heat gun is safer near silicone and less likely to scorch. Neither should ever rest in one place, and a naked flame should not go near a mold at all. After about twenty minutes the resin is too thick for any of it to matter.
Not what most listings imply. Pressure does not remove bubbles from resin; it compresses them until they are too small to see and holds them compressed while the resin sets around them. That is genuinely useful for a small clear casting where one bubble ruins the piece, and it is useless for a surface finish and irrelevant to a 0.7 litre pour. It also does nothing whatever about exotherm — a sealed pot is not somewhere you want a runaway reaction.
A vacuum chamber pulls air out of a liquid before it sets, which is what you want for silicone when making a mold. Used on catalysed casting resin it makes the mix boil up and over the container, and it can pull dissolved gas out of the resin itself. Pressure for casting, vacuum for mold-making — and the two get recommended interchangeably by people who own one of them.
For long sessions, a mixed pour in a confined space, or if you are already sensitised, use a respirator with organic-vapour cartridges. A dust mask does nothing at all against vapour; it is the wrong filter for the wrong hazard. Sanding cured resin is a DUST hazard and a different one. Cured epoxy dust is fine, it is not inert once inhaled, and this is where a particulate filter — P2, P3 or N95 upwards — is the right protection rather than the vapour cartridge. Wet-sand where you can. That is the distinction worth paying attention to when buying: one respirator body takes both, and the cartridges are what you choose per job.
Buying sensibly
It is the cheapest item on this list and it prevents the most expensive failure. If the budget only stretches to one thing beyond the resin itself, this is it — a gallon of casting resin is $90 and a ruined pour is all of it.
Kits bundle a small amount of resin with molds and pigment, and they almost always leave out the scale and the gloves. Check which system the resin is, too — most contain table top / coating epoxy and ship it with molds at a casting depth, which is the wrong pairing.
Casting resin has hours of working time precisely so that bubbles rise and clear on their own, and no hobby pot is anywhere near the size of a river table. If you are pouring anything large, the money is better spent on deep pour / casting epoxy that states its depth properly.
The double-cup method — mix in one, transfer to a second, stir again — eliminates most soft-patch failures on its own, and it doubles your cup use. Buy them in a pack of a hundred and stop thinking about it.
Standing the bottles in warm water for ten minutes before mixing thins the resin more than any torch will, and it works on the bubbles that are already in the bottle rather than only the ones at the surface. It costs nothing and it is the single most effective bubble measure available.
The equipment that matters scales with the project, and most people are making things under 0.7 litres. Mix 10% long, cover it against dust, and the rest is optional for a long time.
Work out the batch before you buy the kit
The equipment that matters scales with the pour. Put your project in and the calculator gives the volume, the resin and hardener split at the weights your scale has to resolve, and the cost at your own prices.
Open the epoxy calculator →Print the pour-depth card
Maximum pour depth and cure windows by resin type — the number that cracks a casting. Free.
Estimates, not advice. Every figure on this page is computed from published reference values and standard measures, so your own inputs, equipment and conditions will move it. Nothing here is professional advice — talk to a qualified professional before acting on it.