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Just wanted to comment to let US casters know that you can get Smooth-On Oomoo 25 and Smoothcast 300 from http://www.artsupply.com/Smooth-On_c_2290.html at a bit of a discount compared to amazon, smooth-on's terrible site, or even theengineerguy site.

Also, they currently (august 2012) have free shipping over $50. I just ordered some and you can pay with paypal. I'm sure its basic UPS ground shipping or USPS parcel, but it's free...so no complaints. They don't have much else that I was really interested in from a miniature modeling/painting perspective, though.

I'm going to be casting some shoulder pads, a banner and probably some bases for my High Elves, IG, and probably everything else I ever do. If you're interested, pics of the shoulder pad and banner are in my gallery images.

And thanks to all of you guys! All of the tutorials, advice, suggestions, etc... so helpful. I'll try to take pics while I'm trying my first castings and post them up.

For anyone who's used Smoothcast 300, what is the consistency of it when cure?

I'm still waiting for my casting supplies to make it here, but in the mean time I'm sculpting a few other things. One problem I'm going to have is that I have a bunch of static pose (1 piece body old marines) and metal terminators and elites and whatnot. So, would it be possible to cast flat iconography and then bend it to a shoulderpad or something like that?

 BLACKHAND wrote:
I havn't tried bending resin yet, I suppose you could heat it in boiled water and try to bend it but I would imagine that it would soften to the point of being easy to squish with hands or tools.

Might be worth trying to sculpt the detail onto a blank shoulderpad and casting that.

I actually have 2 variations of the iconography I need sculpted onto blank shoulderpads now. I'm just trying to find a solution for my terminators and other models that don't have separate pieces for their shoulderpads. (My terminators are the old metal ones)

Finally got my casting supplies... took forever. Price was right, though.

So... and now the results of my first molds and castings.

Molds: as I was waiting more days than I wanted to get my supplies, I sculpted a few more shoulder pads. I had 3 Doom Eagle icon variants, and 1 each of the troop designation shoulder pads. I didn't have any legos handy, but I did have these plastic container type things. I don't remember exactly where they came from, but in GW packages they have some of these types of things. The long and flat one I cut from the packaging of a set of dremel drill bits. I found that these worked fantastically, and are reusable. They are small, so I'm not sure about durability, but I think they are pretty darn solid at this point. All I did was use some PVA on the bottoms to attach the masters. Then I did the "pour from as high as you can into the corner so the air bubbles are forced to break and you get a better mold" technique. It seemed to work well. Without further adeu...


I failed at the first casting attempt. I tried to pour both into one container strait from the container they come in... very messy and I lost pot time trying not to get it everywhere. So, the result was nearly hardened resin before I had even gotten to the last mold... only got the sculpted top for a WHFB square base out of that mess...

My Second attempt worked much better. I poured part A of my smoothcast 300 into a cup and part B into another, then just mixed into one of them... I tried to get too slick with the first batch and screwed myself. Lesson learned. I'm thinking about transferring the Part A and B into their own squeeze bottles (think those red and yellow squeeze bottles that you can put ketchup and mustard in with the small tip). You can get clear ones at Walmart in the states for $1 each. Not sure if the plastic they are made of, being really cheap, will be degraded or affect the resin components or not.... gonna test it one of these days with a small amount of each part in its own bottle.

Anyway... here's the product of my second casting attempt. I ended up with a pretty good result, the only real problem one is one of the eagle pads. part of the skull had a bubble on it.

Here they are:



Thanks again to all you guys, I picked up a ton of tips from you all.
Now to cast a WHOLE bunch more shoulder pads...

yeah, I'm not using mold release. Second successful casting came out great, so I confirmed that all of the details are there in the molds.

 Aerethan wrote:

foto69man wrote:
Just bought some Lego pieces, EasyCast Resin, OOMOO 30 Rubber.............once it arrives, the games will begin.

Probably start small, learn by doing custom bases and shoulder pads and work my way up from there. I'll take pictures and contribute as much as I can to this thread.

Thanks for inspiring me guys!

Is EasyCast the clear stuff at Michaels? I have some of it but it didn't set right when I tried it out, was all rubbery.

Yeah I've got some of that too. I haven't even used it yet, but I was thinking about trying it out to make medallions with some large hornets I picked up after taking out their nest.

 BLACKHAND wrote:
Easycast clear can be tricky, got to stick to the ratio very closely. Some of the pieces I cast with it was hard on the outside but still soft on the inside.

Would be nice to find a 1:1 clear resin , much simpler.

http://www.michaels.com/Castin'-Craft-Clear-Casting-Resin-with-Catalyst/gc1703,default,pd.html

That's what I've got. It's 1:1. Maybe there's a different item/brand with the same name in NZ?