Resin Moulds

[piper1]

Been messing around with resin casting recently.
First made the silicone mould then applied the resin
It does have lots of potential just need try out different resin/epoxy’s but over all pretty happy with the results.

[solac77]

That's awesome been meaning to try it myself for a pipe. How easy is the silicone mould to make?

[piper1]

The silicone moulds are really easy to make, loads of good vids on YouTube.
I also made a De-gassing chamber to suck all the air out of the silicone but not all silicone's require this procedure.

[Get Off My Cloud]

I used to use this resin a lot when i was into prop making years ago.
It's a doddle to use because you just use equal portions of the resin and the activator by weight so no ratios and maths to work out.
It's got a low viscosity so any trapped air escapes easily and it cures in about half an hour, doesn't give off any nasty smelling fumes when curing either.
You can add dyes and fillers too if you want.
www.tomps.com/fast-cast-polyurethane-resin-pu-fast-cast/

[DaveJ]

Interesting. Very interesting.

Having just for the first time tried casting a few buttons (for a home brew mod) I can say there is clearly a lot of different sorts of Epoxy and Polyurethane resins that can be used for casting.

The one poly resin I tried set with a lot of trapped bubbles within the cast. Perhaps that de-gassing chamber spoken of earlier by piper1 might help prevent that. It mixed clear but set opaque white within 20 or so minutes. But there are clearly lots of types...

I found both the epoxy I used and the one poly resin I tried were both happy to accept alcohol based colouring agents/dyes to tint the final product. I've heard of other solid based (powder) colouring agents that are suitable for epoxy castings and maybe they might also work with poly based resins too.

[piper1]

Mar 13, 2017 6:20:54 GMT DaveJ said:

Interesting. Very interesting.

Having just for the first time tried casting a few buttons (for a home brew mod) I can say there is clearly a lot of different sorts of Epoxy and Polyurethane resins that can be used for casting.

The one poly resin I tried set with a lot of trapped bubbles within the cast. Perhaps that de-gassing chamber spoken of earlier by piper1 might help prevent that. It mixed clear but set opaque white within 20 or so minutes. But there are clearly lots of types...

I found both the epoxy I used and the one poly resin I tried were both happy to accept alcohol based colouring agents/dyes to tint the final product. I've heard of other solid based (powder) colouring agents that are suitable for epoxy castings and maybe they might also work with poly based resins too.

Yes the extraction chamber will reduce air bubbles.
Should of mentioned that I have also managed to obtain an old painters compression chamber that was in need of a good clean up and all the valves and gauges replacing.
This will reduce the size of the air bubbles which are unable to be detected by the mark one eye ball, not really put this bit to test just yet.

[Bobsbeer]

Surprising how much air comes out of liquid silicone. It really foams up when you watch it in a vac chamber.

[sej016]

Interesting stuff.

[thebishman]

Another craftsmans thread. Keep em coming chaps!