Diamond Painting - Drilling Down | Resin or Acrylic? How Do You Tell? 

There are many stores/sellers claiming they are selling you resin drills and they do not. Resin drills do not have dimples on the back. Only the acrylic ones do. For the standard drills (i.e., not AB drills), resin drills are much shinier. Acrylic drills have a certain dullness to them. this becomes much more important for square drills because square drills have fewer facets than round drills.

I share your video in the group I'm in from Belgium. They really enjoyed it. Thank you 😊

Thank you so much for all the hard work you put into this. 😊💖🌻🌼🌷

Thank you for all of this great information on a super confusing subject. Most helpful!

Watching the replay of your video!!! We LOVE it!! This was a great informative video! Thank You for sharing this. Now we understand a little bit more about the difference between acrylic and resin drills!!💕💕💕🌟🌟🌞🌞🙂🙂🙏🏻🙏

The dimple trick applies mostly if its uniform across all the drills. Dimples can happen with resin drills but much less often than acrylic drills which tend to have them across almost all of them. Same goes for the little balls. Tiny balls or spheres almost always indicates resin. They can occur in acrylic once in a while. The fact remains that you just can’t get acrylic drills to shine like resin ones.

All I can say about this is WOW Thanks for all the time that you put into this. (Bob)

Wow! Thanks for the video! You have fone so much to help educate the community here, I feel like there is so much misinformation out there trying to qade through it all and make sense of it is a monumental task. I appreciate you taking it on and look forward to any updates you have. I wish I could be of sohe help, but I am clueless about the differences. Like you I am an equal opportunity diamond painted who just wants to get what she pays for. Thank you again!

My goodness, Teacher! That explains exactly all the problems I had with my nightmare painting from DAC. Great information! Thank you soOo much for your research on the subject! Now I can prepare myself for a similar experience on the other 2 large DAC paintings I have stashed. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hi Daphnie! Very interesting video. I find it confusing trying to figure out the difference between acrylic and resin too. I think when the acrylic manufacturing is putting out superior quality it can be hard to figure out. But, I will say, "usually", you always get a good DP experience from resin drills, I think. The only time I ever have problems from a vendor that uses resin drills is in the really dark colors sometimes. But, that's kind of rare too. You got my curiosity really peaked, so I did a little experiment... And, I think there is a way to consistently determine if drills are acrylic or resin by weighing them. They have always claimed that resin drills weigh more. I believe that to be true. And, the weight difference is noticeable. In my experiment, I used a Harbor Freight container, since most people have some of that brand of containers and there's only one size. Using my scale, the empty container weighed 4 grams for reference. Then, I poured SQUARE diamonds in until it completely overflowed. Then, I gently shook it left to right until the extra diamonds fell off and the diamonds were basically level with the top edge of the container. I weighed the container with the diamonds using SQUARE diamonds from 9 different square drill kits from 9 different vendors. And, it looks to me like acrylic drills weighed 24 grams, while the resin drills weighed 27-28 grams for the same container size consistently. And, we know from HAED projects that the drills are a big portion of the cost of a diamond painting kit. So, I thought it might be interesting to look at the data that way too. So, I took the "list price" of the DP kit and divided it by the total # of CM² in each DP kit and that appeared to follow the same trend. All acrylic product kits costs were .0104/CM² or lower, while all resin product kits costs were over .0104/CM². See my chart below. I listed the chart below by cost/CM². Notice that the first 4 vendors appear to be using acrylic, while the last 5 vendors appear to be resin. (Notice that DIYmoon Shop was 28 grams. I believe that Jade said she thought they are using acrylic. I just purchased the kit I used in my test. Looks to me like they may have switched to resin. And, since they are a premium product, it only makes sense that they would be using resin, in my opinion.) It would be interesting to see other vendors drill weights, in addition to the ones I have included below, to see if the consistency continues. And, it would be interesting to see the experiment completed for round drills as well. Feel free to use this info and my name in any follow up videos you create on this topic, if you found this data helpful and want to share. DP Company Grams/Container CM² Price/CM² Drill Type Based on Weight AliExpress (Tesco Painting Store) 24 6300 0.0053 Acrylic AliExpress (Shiny 800 Store) 24 5400 0.0067 Acrylic Wish.com 24 3000 0.0103 Acrylic Mindfulness Diamond Painting 24 4800 0.0104 Acrylic AliExpress (HomeFun Store) 28 9600 0.0105 Resin AliExpress (Ever Moment Store) 27 4900 0.0143 Resin Craftibly 28 3621 0.0152 Resin Diamond Art Club 28 2478 0.0161 Resin DIYmoon Shop 28 2500 0.0352 Resin

I have looked at how the drills are made, too. I love “how it is made” videos. All I can find is some canvas manufacturing and the towers of drill packets being loaded into kits. I was pretty sure they are poured into a form, but could never find out.

Thank you for this information. I have been wondering what the difference was 💜

I used to work in a factory that did injection molding and also some resin. I'm far from an expert and a newbie diamond painter so don't know how helpful I can be. I just finished a diamond dotz square and there were a lot of bad drills that were concave on the bottom, not dimples. The concave is caused by the resin molds being not filled enough. Air bubbles can happen in both.

New subscriber, just for being honest...not irritating ❤

I have only just found this video but as a resin user I wanted to comment. Resin has certain qualities, like it likes to naturally flatten out and has a tendency to have a strong surface tension attraction to edges of moulds; it is also very prone to air bubbles. The dimples in the middle of the back of a drill is unlikely to be resin, I believe, unless the odd one is produced from a stray air bubble rising to the surface; but it does makes sense to be an issue with an injection process. Am sure both are prone to air pockets in the manufacturing process occasionally anyway. The surface tension thing is what causes the concaved appearance on the bottom/back from not using enough resin (ask anyone who uses resin in moulds!). Also the flat extra bits could also be a thin layer of resin from overfilling especially if anything is used to scrape off any excess, so not a definite indication that it would be acrylic (again resin users will tell you that there is often flat bits/edges to trim off resin pieces). The fact that resin naturally likes to level itself out would also mean that it is unlikely to form complete spheres or lumpy bits of trash. I cannot say for certain how drills are made, especially acrylic, but I do have a fair bit of experience working with resin to see how it behaves. I hope this is helpful and that there is more information available now. 🤞

The company that said they had acrylic resin drills actually had a mix of both some colors were resin and some were acrylic. At least that's what I noticed. Oraloas older kits have acrylic and newer ones have resin. I think that's why they say acrylic and resin. Newer kits say version 2 in the description

Love this episode!!!! Resin, acrylic… do you mix them? Do you keep/use them separately? Where do you purchase “quality” acrylic/resin drills? I’m in search of loose quality drill just to have around. Thanks 😊

DAC says that they use resin drills and mine have a whole bunch of dimples, trash and a whole bunch of tabs on them too, I’m currently having a horrible time with the drills that come with Starry Night from Vincent Van Gogh, produced by DAC.. Not talking bad about them, just mentioning my personal experience with DAC, I had the exact same with thing with Dreamer Designs too, I’ve also had the exact same thing with a really cheap company and that’s been with round and squares (haven’t done a square Dreamer Designs yet though) 💖

Why not see if there is a scratch or burn test. I'd assume acrylic would melt faster

DAC has Resin and I find many of the square drills are dimpled which is frustrating

I have been going around and around with Dreamers design diamond painting. They are selling round diamond painting kits and saying they are resin when they are not. I don't know what else to do. I guess I will not be buying anything else from them.

I've been DPing for several years now. They comparison's everyone is trying to figure out is not really any difference. IMO... I have all of the imperfections in both acrylic and resin. The way I determine the difference is, the smell. Resin drills smell like epoxy or paint. Acrylic drills smell earthy almost like mold.

If you can’t tell the difference, why does it matter?