Here begins the little talky bit before we get to the meat potatoes (images). Again I wanted to use vacuum-formed molds to pour my resin into so that I didn't have to waste silicone which would have been significantly more costly. This was my first experiment and it went a little bit different than I had hoped, but anyways check it out.
Pictured above is the belt sculpt in spot putty sanded to 320 (it's just what I had on hand - 180 would have been fine). It's by no means perfect, it's pretty good, but I wanted to start doing some tests on it.
I will create another post in regards to the vaccu-forming process and the machine I am using to do it with, but let's continue.
Here are two pulls I made on the machine. The first pictured further away the plastic was much too hot for Styrofoam, so it's difficult to see, but a lot of the material got vacuumed into the Styrofoam, making the removal super difficult. As a result I had to cut the piece out of the plastic, so a bit of it was lost. The way around this would be to seal the whole thing first leaving no foam visible, my mistake! The second pull the material had less time under the oven, it came out a bit better, but lost some of the finite details. Regardless at this point my original sculpt is technically junk, so if I need to do anymore I will have to re-sculpt it.
The resin I'm using is Smooth Cast 305. It's not ideal for this specific application, but I used it just because it's what I had laying around. More ideal would have been Smooth Cast 300, the biggest difference being the working and cure time (305 is meant to give you much longer in both departments). I had this resin because I was working on a sword that was 29.5 inches long and I didn't want it to cure too quickly before all the bubbles had settled. (I will do a write on the sword later as it was originally a joint project).
Pouring the resin, nothing special, I used some scrap EVA foam to help position the molds as the gem shape made them impossible to stand on their own.
Here's where it starts to get interesting! Although not pictured, I used Mann Ease-Release 200 on the plastic before I poured the resin. Wishful thinking I guess....
I literally had to use a pair of pliers to pry/peel the plastic off the first cast. I knew going into this, that would probably be the case (these were a cheap way to mold something quick and dirty - I didn't expect to get them back, but it would have been nice).
Aside from that the resin cured nicely, instead of using pliers on the last cast pictured, I'm attempting to let it heat up in the sun for a while, see if it frees itself from the plastic or if due to the heat during the curing process is truly melted into it (or at least pretty darn close to being melted)
Below are some close-up photos of the pieces - for documentation.
In summary, these were a success? The casts didn't turn out all that great, and that's partially the fault of the mold (and further the fault of the sculpt), but I knew this going into it. This is something that I'm working on for myself so it doesn't have to be 100% beautiful. Instead I can now take my piece of plastic and work it down to something that more perfect through sanding, use of a dremel etc. As for the second piece we will see how it comes out and I'll probably mention it in the next posting.
Next time we will be painting, potentially attaching some hardware and figuring out how to make this into a functional belt buckle!
Thank you guys for reading, as always if you have any question, comments, thoughts, please let me know.
Cheers,
Kevin
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