great interior design challenge art deco
hello from my basement in the windy city we're gonna try a fun experiment today to make coat rack out of concrete and copper as we're going to take a cheap 3d pvc tile they only cost a few buckets on amazon we're gonna combine that with some spray foam we're gonna use underneath to support the pvc tile and then we're gonna pour the concrete into it and hopefully that concrete is gonna take on the shape of the 3d tile let's get going i had been wanting to use some cheap 3d pvc tile as a concrete form for a while but it's flimsiness was a challenge. i needed up figuring out you could use great stuff, or here. i'm using loctite
insulating spray foam which cost a few bucks a can and spray it underneath the pvc tile to support it the foam expands and becomes fairly strong strong enough to support a thin tile and so it worked really well i'll put some links to the tile and the foam in the description, then i used a turkey cutter to trim up the excess foam from the edges of the tile you could probably use the turkey cutter for the entire base of the form. however, i decided i would just make things a little quicker and went over to the table saw to trim up the edges so it was a perfect square. then i stayed at the table saw to cut down the four sides for wear the form so we got the base of our form done, and it looks good. we're going to make the tile 1/2 inch thick
which is really cool so that you can only do it gfrc. if you use standard concrete mix and tried to make it one half inch thick it would just fall apart it would crumble, it would break, and wouldn't work. we're gonna put half inch mdf down as a separation just to hold this while we make the form we're going to put on our sides then we're going to hot glue these sides in place we're going to flip it over and do our silicone on the insides like we normally do. i think this is gonna be cool. i'm excited to see how it works, so let's see what happens. the taller sides leave a gap under the bottom of the form to allow for the copper pipes that are embedded in the concrete to come through
then i used paste wax to prep the form for the silicone. check out my old videos for more info on that process. then i cut the copper pipe to length since i was going to just insert pieces of pipe straight into the form so that they would be embedded in the concrete when i poured the concrete right over them these would then serve as posts that i could attach my hooks to when i create the coatrack after inserting the copper pipes through the form i used some hot glue to hold them in place so that the concrete wouldn't push them down when i poured it then i took my black silicone caulk and ran the bead around the edges and used the cake fondant tool as i've done in the past to get a absolutely perfect silicone edges i also put silicone around the edge of the copper pipes to prevent any concrete from seeping through and creating cracks
next i went to create a french cleat for this build i wanted to embed screws straight into concrete to hold the french cleat in place so to do this i drilled through the french cleat and screwed longer screws that extended through, and then created a bridge out of some scrap wood, to hold the two french cleat pieces right so that the bottom of the pieces was level with the top of the form where the concrete would be, and so the screws extended into the concrete so they would be embedded when we pour. i'm excited. i've got a new product to try today. it's by fishstone concrete it's their gfrc mix, and this is a just add water gfrc mix it's something that i've been talking to them about for a while
i'm really excited that they put it together to make something that is easy enough that anyone can make this the weekend warrior, the diyer... and it's just as easy as any mix you buy at home depot to use for each 50-pound bag of the gfrc mix you're going to use one gallon or around 8.2 lbs of water, so it's pretty easy to adjust the mix here. i had a 10-pound batch of face coat so i just divided by five and got about 1.6 lbs of water some of you had been asking about the possibility of pouring in the face coat and brushing it in instead of spraying it as it did in some of my past videos
so i decided that i would do a video where i brushed it in and you could definitely get some good results you'll see later the face coat came out nice and clean however the edges weren't exactly perfect so i think there are benefits to spray if you can, but if you can't gfrc it is still definitely an improvement over your standard run-of-the-mill concrete mix i waited about 45 minutes for the face coat to firm up so that the glass fibers in the back coat wouldn't push through and once it did i mixed the back coat. and for this i was doing about 25 pounds of back coat for the two coat racks.
i did one in white, so i just did it this plain mix with water and then added about a pound of glass. if you wanted stronger mix you could go up to a pound and a half of glass fibers per 50 lb bag. it comes in premix bags if you order from fishstone which is nice i place the back mix by hand and it flows really nice as you'll see, especially with the darker coat rack, it really flows and levels out on here nicely and i just used some cheap pigment to die the grey coat rack. i just tried some of the home depot quikrete pigment, which actually worked okay.
for just doing a single batch with a dark mix, and not really caring if i had to color match so i just sort of worked it around. again with the back mix you don't have to vibrate. it's self leveling and it includes some admix that prevents the bubbles from forming, and it just really works nicely. so i covered it let it sit overnight 24 hours later was ready to be bowled this wasn't 100% necessary, but i wanted to get the backs nice and level and so you essentially use the sides of the form as a level to sand down the sides and i just use diamond sanding pads for that.
i want to take a minute to remind you as always that if you enjoy my build videos please click the subscribe button below the video, so you can get notified about all my future builds and i'm also posting quite a bit on instagram if you want to see how my projects are progressing before the build videos go up. follow me on instagram: @modustrialmaker i also used some concrete sealer, which again isn't necessary especially for a coat rack, but i liked the look. here's a little trick i learned that i didn't know before now. to clean up the copper pipe before i put the pieces into the coat rack i just used some nail polish remover and it took all the paint and what-not off of the copper pipe. then i went about designing the hooks and
various pipe workings for the coat racks and i just used some super glue to attach the copper since it didn't really need to be watertight or sealed and it actually did the job very well as for the particular shape of the copper pipe... well, this is really up to you and your design aesthetic. i played around with this for quite a while trying different shapes the one tip i have is when gluing them, to attach the pieces that go into the embedded posts last in fact, some of them, i didn't even need to glue it because they just set nicely after i glued everything else up. then it was time to hang a few things and test it and it held the weight just fine
now this is a really fun project - a cool experiment. if you liked it leave a comment and let me know let me know if you have ideas how to improve it or do variations i always love to hear those and that's it for now, and i'll see you next time.