Friday, February 27, 2015

Orbital Shipyard II: Experiments in Press Molding

Here's the thing about scratch-building starship miniatures: It's difficult. And time-consuming. And fiddly.
(https://deepspacepilots.bandcamp.com/)


Sometimes you get frustrated with trying to build your model from the various pen bits, cigarette lighters, oddments, and thingummys, and you start effing around instead.

Then you wind up with weird abominations like this:


And then you get tantalized. You find more things to press into clay that's a little too stiff to roll out evenly. You try and figure ways around the problems of symmetry. 


You actually try and make a two part press mold work. These are the things you use:


This is what it looks like while the resin is curing:


This is what it looks like when you eff up pouring:


And this is what you get in the end, none of it fitting together or resembling anything usable as a miniature, but all of it promising the wonderous concretization of ideas that is the terminal point of my interest in this hobby:


So. Back to the dry-dock. But with the knowledge that the cosmos will some day yield the sweet, sweet juice of miniature space battles.

1 comment :

  1. Honetsly if you want to replicate such shapes, I'd say get some Siligum, make a mould with it and cast in resin. Oyumaru (aka instant mould) would also be a way and it has the advantge of being quite cheap AND reusable.

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