We had a good carving and needed to save it so we could endure screwing up later.
We used a very hard wax to attach the wax ring to a metal mold holder. The hard part here was that Russ’ basement is very very cold, and the wax would only become pliable once it was warm. So I spent 10 minutes folding it back and forth in front of a space heater before it started to move into a shape that worked for us.
Then we took two pieces of glass (seen on the desk, just behind the metal) and clamped them to the metal. We mixed a two-part silicon mold making material and poured it into the container we’d created. We let it sit. But since neither of us are particularly patient, maybe we didn’t let it sit enough.
Once it was set, we pulled it out of the metal and used an exacto to cut down the middle, being very careful not to cut into the wax ring which was still encased in the silicon.
We tried it out by melting some wax.
But unfortunately, again because of the cold in the basement, the wax would harden upon touching the edge of the mold and wouldn’t pour down into it. We tried heating the mold, to no luck. We tried more heat and a few different waxes before finally finding a particular wax that would work – one that was near water viscosity once melted. We let it sit (again, not for enough time) and pulled it out – near perfect! There was a slight flaw in the result, but Russ was convinced that it was because we were impatient, and not because the mold was poor.
Thinking about it now, this save point was also “good enough”. If we’d screwed up down the line, we would have been able to use this replica to save myself a ton of work, even if it did have a minor imperfection in it. There’s still lots of work to do before we got to the final stage, and lots of stages to fix mistakes!
The next step I missed most of, because it involved babysitting a kiln for 8 hours. I’m going to write about it, but since I wasn’t there, my knowledge of it comes from wikihow, and not from actual doings. 😛
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