Shop-made Epoxy Mold
Jess CrowThere are lots of ways to work with resin. It can be cast, used as a table top decoration or finish, poured as a skim coat to add a decorative element to your projects. Casting resin is easy and, thanks to what we’re about to show you, you can make your own resin molds in ANY shape you want.
Start with a Printer
Start your work at the computer by finding a shape you like for your resin mold and printing it on a piece of paper. OK, you could skip the printer step if you can draw well. Look for cool shapes by adding the work clip art to your search. For example: star clip art, state map clip art, or heart-shaped clip art. The bottom line is you’ll need your design printed or drawn on a piece of paper.
What you Need
Grab your artwork, a piece of heavy mil plastic (6-mil or more) and a tube of 100% silicone caulk. The plastic needs to be slightly larger than your artwork. It’s really important that you use 100% silicone caulk for your resin mold. Epoxy won’t stick to it.
Build a Dam
With the plastic overlaying your artwork, trace the design with your silicone. The caulk needs to be built up to a height that matches the thickness you want your final resin piece to be.
Pour and Go
Let the caulk dry overnight, and you’re ready to pour your resin. Once the resin cures you can flex the plastic and silicone away from it to release it from the mold. Sand the edges, if you want, to make them more uniform.
Thanks to Jess Crow of Crow Creek Designs for this great tip.
Today we're going to go over making your own mold. Just in case you don't have a mold available or maybe you need just one item of something. In order to do that, all you need is a hundred percent silicone, some heavy mil plastic, and the design of your choice and you just print out on your computer. From there, all we need to do is take and move the paper under the plastic. Use the silicone to create a heavy bead on top of the plastic.
And then we're going to need to wait for it to cure. Once it's fully cured, you can take your resin that you've already mixed, whatever color of your choice, and then we're just going to pour it carefully into the mold. Want to give it a chance to spread out a little bit. So we're not going over the walls. If you really need to, you can use your finger or a small stir stick.
to help spread it into the small nooks and crannies. We don't have to worry too much about the edges of the silicone creating a rough edge. After we pop this out of the mold in about 24 hours, you can easily lightly sand the edges or you can just leave them as is. Resin won't stick to silicone. So that's why we want to make sure that we're sticking with a hundred percent silicone.
And after that, we'll pop this out. Hi guys, we've let our resin sit for the last 24 hours. So it's ready to be popped out of its mold. So we're going to go ahead and do that and I will show you how you can easily save this mold and continue to reuse it over and over again. In the meantime, you can see we have a little bit of spillover.
This is easily fixed by sanding it, just like we have done this one. This edge has been sanded. This edge has not been. If you would like to make your mold thicker, you can do so by adding a little bit more silicone and then using a 2:1, a 5:1 or deep set resin. Remember, anything that you can think of?
You can trace, you can print it out. You can create your own mold from.
i notice you don't wear a mask. What about fumes?