Molding a Miniature Kit - Part 1

it's fun to make your own model kits i picked up this kit from reaper miniatures it's a black star corsair charlie and the artist is c lewis for resin casting it's almost always best to break your model up into pieces it's just easier to cast them that way i could sprue and bend these as individual pieces but i think the cleanest way to do them is to make sort of a hybrid squish mold and that means leaving the parts attached to the sprues i need to modify these parts a little bit and make sure they're laying in more or less a flat plane i don't like how this head is too close up here so it's just that's not good i'm going to move it down here and that will get me a better parting line just use the waxer to make a bridge of wax right in between those okay now both of those parts are laying a lot flatter than they did before just using a little bit of sticky wax to tack these parts on that looks good that lays them right in there let's weld this in place i'm happy with the layout of these parts as you can see they're quite planar let's break out the plastic rod collection what we need to do is we need to attach this assembly to the box and to do that we're going to build a couple of struts all that i want to accomplish is i want this support system to hold this piece vertical in the mold it's all this is for the more i look at this layout the less i like it there's too much wasted space i think that i could reconfigure these a little bit and make it into a much smaller much tighter mold you think this looks better i'm saving about a third of the materials okay so four and five-eighths by three inches let's go build a box okay let's cut some plex this still has the protective covering on it which is good keep it nice and clean i like to color mark the corners just put a nice little mark on each corner and that way i know that everything is going to go back together the way it came apart here's a tip make the holes in your plexiglass bigger than your screw threads that way there's no danger that your screw will crack the plex when you attach it to the front let's get this box assembled box is built and looking good the surface of the box is plastic laminate and that's not going to give us any problem with the rubber but the silicone rubber would love to stick to this unfinished wood here and i didn't finish it anywhere inside so what i think i'll do is just run a bead of wax down along the joint i put a brand new spoon bit on my waxer and that ought to be perfect for smoothing these beads down in here see how this works oh yeah it works like a champ just gonna seal that right up it doesn't have to be pretty down in there just has to not leak i was going to use beeswax to seal up these surfaces but sometimes it's just better to use the tool that's in your hand the box is waxed and ready to go before we pour rubber around these parts we're going to need to fill these three holes and that's so that they don't catch bubbles deep holes like that are just a prime place to catch a bubble of air when the mold fills it just won't go in there so i like to pre-fill areas like that so i mixed up a very small amount of rubber in the cup and you want to be very careful when you're filling holes like this to fill from one side and let the rubber run all the way down into the hole because you can very easily trap a bubble doing this filling job you don't want to do that you want to let the rubber fill the hole just flow in there under the force of gravity and push the air out this is just the craft of mold making sometimes you have to do little finicky fiddly crafty things like this to make sure you have a shot at getting perfect molds now see that rubber has filled all the way to the bottom of that hole just exactly what we want to see so we can give it a second application i already know that i'm not going to catch a bubble down inside that joint that that hole is going to fill perfectly i take my time when i do this stuff i want this stuff to be done right just float in there perfectly just like that fill that up nice nice these surfaces are down in the mold so these little details in here could very very very easily catch air like in that little boat right in that little pocket right in there you have a much better chance of not catching bubbles down in these areas because all these little details are pre-filled always a good idea to do this okay good those parts are looking good now we'll let these parts bask in the glow of the hot box and even though they're dinky little blobs i'm pretty sure they'll cure at this temperature it's the next morning and these came out perfecto so now what we want to do is mount this kid here like that and to do that we'll break out the handy dandy wolf sticky wax i don't trust the sticky wax to hold the part by itself but if i run a bead of sculpting wax all along it that will make the joint much stronger all right that looks great just the way we want it we're ready to put the flex on the front of the box and the first step is to peel the paper off get a nice clean plastic surface out of the deal we're going to have to make a gasket and the reason for that is it's almost certain that the plex will let rubber leak out of the mold because it's not going to make that tightest seal to the box so what i've got is i've got some polyethylene mini fiber it's just a light fluffy plastic powder you can buy and i'm just going to add a little to my cup and all this is going to do is make the rubber from a liquidy flowing material into a paste and let's just take and put some on all the way around so i'm going to be gentle as i handle the mole box because my parts are precarious they're only held in place from the bottom by that wax and i do not want them to come off okay that's going to be more than plenty expect we're going to get a decent amount of squeeze out let's put the plex on and as you can see do a little wiping of excess we got a perfect seal all the way around just exactly the way we wanted to set up beautiful all right i mixed up a 350 gram batch of rubber which should be enough i hope i hope we don't have to top it i'm draping this part up in the corner more than i would like it's never good to drape apart with rubber because you can trap air underneath that drape and those that's not beneficial i think we'll get away with it but we would like to see the parts get coated by the rise of the rubber up from the bottom because that pushes the air out on top and away from the parts when you scrape the cup you invariably stir up some bubbles but as we are near the top of the mold we should be able to break most of those bubbles as we pour and also they have not that far to go to rise up so with any luck they won't cause us any problems as you can see i came up a hair short on the mix and i could mix more rubber but instead i'm going to break out the chunkies i have to be super careful putting in these chunkies because the model's fragile and i sure don't want to break it or knock it off its base the mold is done and ready to go but so are we i hope you liked this video if you did watch this video next thanks for watching i'll see you next week

Channel: Robert Tolone

Views: 20,919

Keywords: silicone rubber moldmaking, rubber mold, miniature, miniature kit

Id: lLkpJHOdFA8

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022