How to make a silicone rubber mold

[Dana_Gifford]

Howdy-

I just added a new photo album to our Facebook page on how to make a silicone rubber mold.

http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep81td

It features a custom mold frame we had made for us by the local technical high school machine shop. The frame is adjustable and allows us to make molds 1 inch high x 3 1/2 inches deep and; 1, 1 3/4, 3 3/4, 4 3/4, or up to 6 1/2 inches wide. The main frame was machined from a solid billet of aluminum. It is as large a frame as will fit in our vulcanizer. They charged us less than $20.00 to make it. The matching plates were cut from an aluminum sign I wire brushed the vinyl sign material off of. If you have a technical high school in your area I cannot stress enough how great a resource they are. In Connecticut where I currently live (this winter has made, no, forced me to find a place in a much warmer state, like NO snow warmer, any suggestions?) we have a regional technical high school system that will perform work for residents. In addition to the mold frame I have had the HVAC department build me a custom exhaust hood that anywhere else would have cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, ours cost less than $100, labor and material included. I hope some of you will find this album informative and don't forget to check out your tech schools.



Be well,
Duke
houseofbubba.com

[Edit]

Sharing files and pictures with Orchid is easy - Simply attach them to your Orchid post.

[/Edit]

[John4]

Duke,

Nice set of photos. One suggestion when titling it, I would be helpful to know that it shoeing process for HEAT VULCANIZED rubber molds. The adjustable mold frame is a great idea too. Using Tech Schools as a "materials working" resource is good too.

We haven't used the vulcanizer in YEARS, instead using room temperature vulcanizing mold materials. The heat vulcanized rubbers tend to be tougher materials and less prone to damage if used a lot but one or a few use RTV molds are good for us. Also the heat vulcanized mold material tend to have a longer mold/shelf life than RTV's unless one uses platinum cured silicons. These are expensive and do not get along well with some master materials and the are easily "contaminated" by using equipment that has been used with other materials.

Again, the "tutorial" was great. Where was the finished ring molde

I do work in larger pieces, bronze sculpture mostly thus the use of RTV mold materials, but Cynthia (wife) was a jeweler for YEARS and we have all her jewelry equipment and we do get into jewelry "items" on occasion.

John Dach
MLCE.net

[Dana_Gifford]

John-

Thanks for the kind words and constructive suggestions. I too use RTV for a lot of my molds. I show my procedures for RTV on our website

http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep81sx

I have been using photopolymers to create my some of my models and the button we created for Lily is a good example of the polymer technique and RTV molding procedure we use.

I am not familiar with the, "platinum cured silicons" you refer to.

Ahhh, "where is the finished ring mold?" The buckle tutorial (I have been trying to figure out what to call these things I keep writing, I call them articles, but I really like tutorial) was something I had put together a little while ago, but the ring mold was something I was working on this week. I threw in the ring pictures to show the height capacity of the big mold frame. I was also trying to make the ring mold self-separating, which I accomplished, BUT I didn't get the parting line where I wanted it, so I didn't show the results.

The attached picture is a set of home made RTV mold frames under our bell jar, they don't make the size I needed so I made it myself and made it as large as our equipment can handle.



Be well,
Duke

[Edit]

Sharing files and pictures with Orchid is easy - Simply attach them to your Orchid post.

[/Edit]