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Mods...let me preface this by saying that I am am not sure that the discussion about InstantMold was axed. If it was, I expect this thread to get thrown out as well. But, if possible, leave the tutorial and remove the pics. I think this is good info. Hopefully the fact that I used a SM bolter doesn't offend anyone, but it's a nice example of the detail attainable with InstantMold and clay.

In the meantime, I hope this helps someone...

I ordered my InstantMold after reading just the first post about it in the News&Rumors section. I was sold at first sight. I have not tried Milliput or GS with it. I have tried latex rubber and it sucks. My mom told me I could have a bunch of Fimo soft modelling clay that she happened to have at her house. After a few days, I managed to make it over there and pick up my newly acquired wares. When combined with common sense, the InstantMold and Fimo clay make quite a nice molding combination.

I'll outline my process first, then provide pics below. You will need InstantMold, Fimo soft modelling clay, baking flour and some small round objects. I used airsoft bb's. They don't have to be round objects, but they are abundant around my household.

1) Clean your piece of all mold lines. If you still happen to have it on the plastic sprue, keep it there. The bolter I molded was not on the sprue. It helps to have the sprue with smaller, intricate pieces. It gives you more media to help yank the part from the mold, besides the inevitable flash, which can be pretty thin and often tears right off (we want our flash to be as thin as possible anyways, right?)

2) Boil up your first piece of InstantMold. Quickly roll it into a ball and put it on a piece of glass or tile.

3a) Place your master piece into the InstantMold, taking care not to push it much more than halfway into the IM. Take a molding/carving implement and try to get the IM flush to the side of the imbedded piece. Remember, you want about half of the master piece outside of the InstantMold.
3b) Mash a few airsoft bb's around the master piece, about 1cm away from the piece. Make sure you don't comprimise the work you did in step 3a.

4) Leave your master and the bb's in the mold, run them under cold water for 20 seconds or so. Dry it off thoroughly.

5) Boil up some more InstantMold, a tad bit more than your original amount. Mash it over the first part of your mold, taking care to make sure it captures as much detail as possible from the top of your master piece. I tend to put the more detailed part of the master piece facing upwards, as you can be more assured that you capture detail with this step. I like to mash the top part of the mold all the way down to the surface you are working on. i.e., the bottom piece will be enveloped by the top piece. This helps with lining up the mold, along with the bb's.

6) While both pieces are stuck together, run them under 20 seconds of cold water again. The beauty thing about InstantMold is that warm InstantMold has a hard time sticking to cold InstantMold. Peel the mold halves apart and remove the master piece and bb's. Dry everything thoroughly.

7) Grab a small bit, not too much, of your clay. Knead it for a minute or so until it becomes really soft and warm. (That's what she said)

8) Dunk your mold halves in baking flour. Remove them from the flour one at a time and hold them by the edge. Flick the crap out of them with your free hand/fingers. This will leave enough flour to make the InstantMold not want to stick as much to the clay. The IM will not stick to the clay if you don't have the flour, but it won't release it as readily, possibly marring your work.

9) Place an appropriate amount of clay into the bottom part of your mold. The first bit of clay you put it, no matter how conservative, will almost always be too much! Dial it back a bit, if needed. Place your bb's into their indents now, to help with lining up the mold.

10) Mash your mold pieces together. If you had a sprue on your master piece, make a note to try to expel most of the extra clay out of the hole left by the sprue, after making sure that all the little crevices and details of your mold are filled with clay. InstantMold is see-through...and that fact is awesome, take advantage.

11) CAREFULLY pry your mold halves apart and pop your bb's out. The clay will want to stick to one side of the mold or the other...let it do what it wants. Once you are holding the half of the mold with the clay, you may need to bend the mold a little to pop the clay out. If you have thick enough flash to pull the piece out, it likely means that your product is going to be too thick. The IM will bend quite a bit without cracking, and I mean quiiiiite a bit. In any case...just carefully remove your piece.

12a) Place your piece on a baking tray and bake it at 230 degrees F for 20-25 minutes. The packaging for the Fimo says 30 minutes, but you'll be doing pieces so small that 20-25 should do it. Do a bunch at a time...if you're like me your gas bill is already horrendous.
12b) Rock out to some Ozzy or The Who. This step is critical. - see photo

13) Remove the pieces from the oven. They'll cool down rather quickly, but just be careful (common sense)

14) With the pieces removed having been given a few minutes to cool down, they can be handled safely. Don't be worried about fingerprints, or obscuring details, but remember that it is clay and is more brittle than plastic. That being said, you have to really ape the piece to break it, the cured clay is pretty strong.

15) Handle the piece and use a hobby knife to remove flash.

16) Prime and paint your piece! - see photo

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope you have great results! My 2nd or 3rd try at molding with Fimo clay came out great. Just follow the above steps and you should be good. Oh, and be careful with your pieces, remember...it's clay. I'd like to stress that once cured it IS pretty tough, though.

They will, it turns out to be illegal to do this, and although I doubt anyone will kick down the door to your house to look into it, obviously the Mods can't have this specific stuff posted.

That being said, AMAZING TUTORIAL.

Best result I have seen with Instamold by miles and miles!

I would suggest maybe just taking something small and intricate, for example, make up a small scenic base with rocks and cork, and mold that. Maybe a plastirod pipe or something to show an inorganic edge too?

This would show your ability to capture detail just as well, and, on top of it, show a useful and legal use for it in creating your own resin style bases mass production style!

Thank you very much for your time and effort though

I have removed the pics, and edited the off-topic chatter out of the thread for now.

Officially, dakka can't promote or endorse the copying of GW (or any other company's) parts. We're more than happy for pressmoulding articles to be published, but they must feature parts that you created yourself, or have the right to reproduce.

If you would like to edit the references to GW parts out of your tutorial, and add new pics with some other item you're copying, that would be more than acceptable.

Will get on that asap. Getting late here now. Mods, thank you for leaving up the text part of the tut. Sorry that you had to remove part of it.

Major Tom, thank you for your kind words!

Thanks Shifty for a great tutorial
and also to Insaniak and the Mods for not removing the thread entirely.

Soft Fimo was the one thing I didn't try out but had already purchased in anticipation of its use in press moulds . Pleased to see it is potentially a good medium for the job.

Your mold making concept is pretty much standard when making multi-part molds, but this is a great tutorial for those who has never done this kind of stuff before.

Fimo is fine. You can also use Scupley and it has several different kinds of hardness.

Flour? I use talcum powder instead for certain two part molds

Now I purchased some of this product myself and I have experience in mold making and I can see some uses for InstaMold.

But I will have to think this out real carefully and listen to others and their input on this product.

Thanks again for the tutorial.

Yupp. Just intended this for anyone that either hasn't done a mold before or is having fits trying to get the most detail they can out of their current pressings.

Definitely going to purchase some instamold, and more than likely try it out using the method you have described. I would be most interested in hearing if people think Fimo is the best medium to use, or if there is another that would be better.

Thanks for posting it!

The whole process hinges on being able to get the soft clay out of the mold safely. Once it's out, if it's not too distorted, you can bend it back to shape.

For doing flat-backed presses, just press them directly onto your baking sheet and leave them there, ready to bake.

For my two-part molds of things not to be named or pictured, once you pop it out of the mold you should be able fix the bending incurred while getting it out. Once baked, the Fimo is pretty reasonable to deal with.

*Edit* Why not stick your flat-backed molds onto a piece of paper to yank them out of the mold. I would think that the paper should be fine in the oven, at 230 F. Once cured, the paper should release the hardened clay... Trying this now, update in 30 min.

Ritides wrote:

I would be most interested in hearing if people think Fimo is the best medium to use, or if there is another that would be better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_clay

Personally, I use Sculpey because of the wide array of modeling clay they have.

Anybody know instamold works with two part resins?

I normally use two-part resin.

As it heats up a little bit while curing I am looking forward see how it interacts with the Oyumaru I have bought. I don't expect it to have much of an impact as it really doesn't reach any temperatures approaching that of recently boiled water.

Will do a test tonight and post pictures.

Forgot to say
The resin I used did generate heat when it went off before I used it all. It does get hot if there is a lump of the stuff.

However, the small amounts used in the scale of castings we are generally talking about dissipated any heat rapidly and has no effect on the Oyumaru moulds.

hth

Cool.

Sounds good.

That is excellent news about the resin. I will pick some up locally and give it a shot.

I ordered 3 more packages of InstantMold. My girlfriend thinks I'm going more crazy than normal.

Hey shifty, where do you get Fimo clay? Is it an art store thing or something that might be in a kids toy store?

I got it from my mom. Haha, she had a CRAPLOAD of it, in unopened packages.

There was actually a 2 for 1 on Fimo and Sculpey at our local craft store. Methinks it is probably pretty common. Michael's or Hobby Lobby.

Shoot on down to Rockford sometime and I'll give you a bunch, lol.

Do you go to Rock Conn? Haven't been there yet myself but the Madison group pretty much goes there "en masse". Might make it a priority next year if I can.

Never been to Rock Conn.

I make it up to Madison a couple times a year, but usually it's for work emergencies.

Fimo is abit iffy in my opinion, nice to work with, but it never seems to cure nicely for me, allthough it could be me being stupid.

Im definately going to get some instantmold, worth a try for the cost of it. And since I have no experience with molding, seems like a sensible place to start.

One thing I would like to know about this stuff (sorry if this is a stupid question), what exactly can you cast in it? is plaster ok to use?

The Fimo cures pretty good for me. It's no secret that I made a few SM bolters, and even the tiny little pistol grip on them was stuck on there pretty good.

25 minutes in the oven at 230 degrees will do ya.

just curious but how can you use bake-clay with instantmold when it reforms/softens/warps at 170 Degress???

The guide states that you remove the clay from the mold then bake the duplicated piece.

I love InstantMold. I bought some recently and did some work with making tyranid bases. I sculpted these bases with Aves Fixit putty and used some hive bases from MicroArt studio as "inspiration" but the originals are hand made. The duplicates came out great using more Fixit and greenstuff. I just coated the mold with alittle sunflower oil as a release agent.







I also did some detailing on a few Terminators but i wont show them because ...well you know... those pics are on my blog inf you want to see. Its great for duplicating details like shoulder icons and eagles.

I'm getting some 5 minute Grey epoxy in a few days and am going to experiment with it as well. Ill just leave the putty in the mold until it sets, taht way no worry of deformation. I've tried 20 minute Quickplastik epoxy from the DIY store and that works good too although it does smell like rotten eggs when soft.

So cool. Would love to see other people work with the insta mold...I really have to get some.

has anybody tried this with stuff like JB weld? since JB weld air cures you could just leave it in the instamold till it's cured. in theory it should work like resin without the heat that resin creates.

best stuff to use IMH would be car body filler. Goes off rally fast (depending how much harder you use) and it sands to a glass finish. and it's cheap.

Coating the molds with oil, brilliant. Much, much better than flour. Flour did ok, but using oil is the way to go.

how about vaseline?

That would almost certaily be too thick and difficult to control.

Oil leaves a very thin coat over the whole mould. Wiping the mould clean will not remove the oil and will still enable you to get a good cast.

I used to use talc for casting metal minis.

Officially, dakka can't promote or endorse the copying of GW (or any other company's) parts. We're more than happy for pressmoulding articles to be published, but they must feature parts that you created yourself, or have the right to reproduce.

Wasn't there a WD article about how to copy things like shoulderpads using GS?