Molding and Casting 101

Welcome to my basic molding and casting blog post. In this post I'm going to show different methods of molding and casting your own parts, or molding and casting things that you create if you want more copies and, or want to sell you items. Below, you'll see a series of pictures showing how I did a volumetric study of an existing mold and used that volumetric study to cast a part from an exisitng mold. The mold for this part is from a hand crafted part that I made for the TOS Wall Mount Communications Panel, found on this blog. This is the alert indicator for that prop. I've used basic stuff found around the kitchen to use for measuring and mixing. Some of this stuff is disposable, so you reduce clean up time as well as waste and mess. Since we've got an existing mold and since we are using binary resin and hardener there are no confusing formulas, or wieghing, or mathematics. The first step is to fill your mold with tap water, just past the point where you want to make the new part. Next, take that water and pour it into one of two identical containers. After that, take the water and measure it into two sepsrate, but equal parts into your two identical containers. This gives you exactly the amount of each component that you will need of the binary resin mixture. Make a mark, or identify a spot on each container where the levels are. Pour out the water and thoroughly dry out the two containers and the mold. Pour your resin into one container just a bit past your original level and do the same for the hardener, or catalyst. Thoroughly mix the two parts making as few bubbles as possible and allow it to sit for just a bit to allow what ever bubbles are intrained into the mixture to pop, then take the mixture and pour it into the mold. After the mixture has been poured into the mold use a hairdryer to heat up and slightly agitate the mixture. This will help speed up the process and will help get any small bubbles to the stop.

Next we demold the part and check for bubbles, sand and finish, then display. As you can see below we've removed the part from the mold and sanded with 400 grit sand paper, to come up with a perfect replica of the original signal lamp. :)