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Step 4Casting
All right, time to get serious! Yup, it's time for the cement.
The cement I'm using here is Duracal and it mixes with a 4:1 cement-water ratio. Cement is tough stuff so you'll want to mix it up with incrementally larger amounts. What I did was add 400g of Duracal to 100g of water and stirred that for a while until it was well mixed. Then I would add another 400g of Duracal and 100g of water and keep on mixing again until it was well mixed. For each stone, I used about 2.2kg of Duracal.
If you look at the 1st and 2nd photos here you'll see my first attempt. Two things went wrong here: the cement wasn't mixed well enough and the mold had undercuts in the vents that broke off when I pulled the mold off. The first time I mixed the concrete I tried it all in one go. It took forever to mix it up and even then it was uneven. It looks distressed, which is kinda cool, but not what I was going for.
I also went over the mold with a razor blade to clean up the undercuts and got much better lines on the vent.
The Duracal was supposed to be able to be removed from the mold after 2 hours. I waited 3-4 hours for these two. It needs 24 hours to dry out most of the way and I was told that it takes 30 days to completely dry out.
The cement I'm using here is Duracal and it mixes with a 4:1 cement-water ratio. Cement is tough stuff so you'll want to mix it up with incrementally larger amounts. What I did was add 400g of Duracal to 100g of water and stirred that for a while until it was well mixed. Then I would add another 400g of Duracal and 100g of water and keep on mixing again until it was well mixed. For each stone, I used about 2.2kg of Duracal.
If you look at the 1st and 2nd photos here you'll see my first attempt. Two things went wrong here: the cement wasn't mixed well enough and the mold had undercuts in the vents that broke off when I pulled the mold off. The first time I mixed the concrete I tried it all in one go. It took forever to mix it up and even then it was uneven. It looks distressed, which is kinda cool, but not what I was going for.
I also went over the mold with a razor blade to clean up the undercuts and got much better lines on the vent.
The Duracal was supposed to be able to be removed from the mold after 2 hours. I waited 3-4 hours for these two. It needs 24 hours to dry out most of the way and I was told that it takes 30 days to completely dry out.
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I didn't read anything about you adding any reinforcement bar,to this mix
Stepping stones, are usually made of Concrete, not cement.
cheers
As my post states, stepping stones are usually made from concrete.
cement is an adhesive. Adding even something, like chicken-wire, or coathanger wire, in the form will add a little bit of (reinforcement), sturdiness to plain concrete. :)
concrete: A heavy, rough building material made from a mixture of broken stone or gravel, sand, cement, and water, that can be spread or poured into molds and that forms a stonelike mass on hardening