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Step 7The Board- Making a copy from the Mold
After we had the rubber mold ready I wrote the people at Form FX (excellent customer support!, by the way!) and asked for the cheapest, strongest material available. They pointed me to Crystacal- Alpha K, which is a extremely hard plaster.
-Working with crystacal is fairly easy: measure the water you need, then pour the plaster, little by little, mixing thoroughly. In this case I wanted the plaster to remain liquid so that I could pour it easily on the mold, but not that much that it wouldn´t dry up, of course :P
-After the plaster had hardened, removing it from the mold puts the rubber to a test, and everything worked out fine. I don´t know how many copies will the mold resist without tearing, but it went through the first copy in perfect condition.
The pictures below show the finished piece before and after painting. I used a first layer of arabic gum to seal the plaster, then I painted it with two layers of black acrylic. Later on I made some experiments and it seems that I could actually have mixed the plaster with the black paint to get directly a shade of gray... anyways, I think that it looks pretty cool, and the layer of alkyl gave it a nice texture too.
Making a plaster board from the mold -safe the hahaharesearchhahaha costs- takes two days -most of the time waiting for the plaster and paint to dry- and around $10 in plaster.
By the way, the board is big, heavy and hard as a rock. _
-Working with crystacal is fairly easy: measure the water you need, then pour the plaster, little by little, mixing thoroughly. In this case I wanted the plaster to remain liquid so that I could pour it easily on the mold, but not that much that it wouldn´t dry up, of course :P
-After the plaster had hardened, removing it from the mold puts the rubber to a test, and everything worked out fine. I don´t know how many copies will the mold resist without tearing, but it went through the first copy in perfect condition.
The pictures below show the finished piece before and after painting. I used a first layer of arabic gum to seal the plaster, then I painted it with two layers of black acrylic. Later on I made some experiments and it seems that I could actually have mixed the plaster with the black paint to get directly a shade of gray... anyways, I think that it looks pretty cool, and the layer of alkyl gave it a nice texture too.
Making a plaster board from the mold -safe the hahaharesearchhahaha costs- takes two days -most of the time waiting for the plaster and paint to dry- and around $10 in plaster.
By the way, the board is big, heavy and hard as a rock. _
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