Silver Metalic

Happy Cake Day

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I think the vacuum formed object in the spray on chrome demo is a standard blank for automotive paint samples. It loosely resembles a car.

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You have mentioned casting a bunch. Casting is awesome, but is something I have only done a tiny little bit. I appreciate the Prop:Shop video link: sifting through tutorials to find a ‘good’ one can be tricky for an amateur.
So, moldmaking and casting materials. Do you have a prefered supplier, or prefered brand to work with? Alternately, do you have any advice of suppliers or brands to avoid, stuff that has failed you?

For example, I can say from experience that repeated casting with a two-part plastic resin will rapidly degrade a plaster-of-paris mold. Also that it might not be a good idea to mix up too much resin at once.
From left to right: Fimo original, Cast 1, Cast 2, Cast 3. My 4-part plaster mold was unusable after the 3rd cast.


I’m gonna ping @sawa on this too.

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smooth-on all the way. and you have to make sure to get products that work together and use the right release agents. You can use things like plaster of paris, but you need to wax the inside depending on what youre pouring in there as they can react together.

They have different products for different applications. slush casting will be different products than filling a matrix mold, or a regular 2 part mold etc.

Theres a whole science to this stuff, but if you watch videos by tested, frank ippolito, bill doran (punished props), and harrison krix (volpin props), you can learn a lot.

smooth-on is a little expensive, but the money youll save on not getting terrible pulls will save you time, money, and frustration in the end.

smooth-on also have a lot of good tutorials on their site for using their products, some actually made by the aforementioned prop makers.

in a number of larger cities there are resellers of smooth-on products. like ‘the engineer guy’ in atlanta, who not only sell the products but offer courses every weekend on different products and techniques. its a lot of fun, and highly informative, not to mention hands-on, which is the best way to learn.

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heres a link to some of their beginner tutorials. sooo much good stuff here

and heres a tested video with frank doing a block mold that looks like it might work well for those figures that you posted above:

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Very cool. Thanks for that!

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These are exactly kind of the starting points I was hoping you could share. Thanks!
(edit- at the time that I made those little guys above I was living off-grid with no internet, blissfully unaware of using silicone for the mold!)

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Smooth-on is great!! They have a HUGE variety of castables and great information. I use them often. My other favorite source is uscomposites. They are no frills but have good tech support and are really inexpensive and a great product.

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Another Smooth-On user here. Their list of materials is exhaustive and you have to watch their recommendations closely, particularly when it comes to platinum cure vs tin cure silicone mold rubbers and particular casting resins. Some of them simply are not compatible and you can end up with a casting that has cured in the middle but absolutely will not cure where it meets the mold face. This issue ruins the part, and the mold! But it’s really not a big issue, they tell you all this stuff in their data sheets.

Currently I am a big user of their Crystal Clear series resin, Smooth Cast series resin, Onyx resin (pure, beautiful black), and Mold Max 30 tin cure silicone. Fortunately, all the resins I mentioned are compatible with the Mold Max and at least 98% of the time I use them with no release agents whatsoever. I reliably get 60-70 pulls from a mold which suits my purposes fine. If I’m getting to the end of a mold’s life and I need just that last pull (or handful of pulls), I give it a puff of talcum powder before casting… Except if I’m using the Clear Cast, no talc before that because I’m usually going for a pristine clear polish straight out of the mold.

By the way, I’m using Smooth Cast and Onyx with a 2.5 minute pot life. That’s FAST, and it gets HOT, which degrades the mold faster, although I still get 60-70 pulls like I mentioned before.

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