Resin Casting - uggh.

This is a hard entry to write, since it really exposes my utter lack of patience in some things. If you have been following along on this blog (which most likely, according to the site stats, you haven't), I've been trying to build all three Furioso Dreadnought variants from a single kit + 2 AoBR Dreads. You can read a few posts down to see how it went, but essentially, I got the bodies done and the Librarian's force weapon magnetized.

The problem, though, is the CCW arms. Now I wouldn't have a problem buying them through a bitz site, but the right arm is over $14.00! I am the biggest supporter of market forces dictating price, and I am not surprised that there is such a demand, but I can buy the whole kit for around $36.00, so this wasn't going to work for me. So casting became a viable option. well, "viable" may be too strong a word; let's say "possible" instead.

So I did a bunch of research, and it looked straightforward but not exactly easy. There were several hundred ways to go wrong, and the kit is relatively expensive...the value will come in repeatability. But I found an Alumite kit that was on clearance, so I just dove in.

The kit has both resin bottles and the two parts of the rubber compund to make the mold. It also had a decent amount of putty.

The immediate problem I came across was the rubber for mold making. There was not enough in this starter kit to make both parts ot he two part mold. Instead of waiting and buying more rubber, I decided to just try creating half with the understanding that i was just trying it to see if I had the competence to do it at all. Again, there are many YouTube and forum tutorials on the subject, and they are all uniformly good, so I will not detail my steps, but here are the arms ready to do in the "box":

The little wood pieces are from a generic version of Jenga, and I hot glued all the gaps. The putty was laid in and I used sprue material to make the vents.

Rubber and catalyst are mixed and poured. No leaks, but you can see that I needed to mix it a bit more thoroughly.

The next day, I pulled the mold. It worked great! The detail is strikingly good, and I have no doubt that I could have created the second part of this mold, deepened the vents, cleaned up the rubber flash, and cast myself some arms.

And that's when this whole thing screeched to a halt. I had already spent $15.00 on the casting kit (it's twice that when not on clearance), and I was about to buy more rubber mold compound, which is at least a 20 dollar proposition.

Well, at that rate, I could just go with these:

Ten dollars each! Forgeworld, I love you.

I'm not rebuking casting. In fact, I feel much more confident than I did about it, and that's worth the expense in and of itself.