Friday 1 June 2012

Miniature Moulding...the Process

For those interested, Pete the Mouldmaker has been nice enough to post pictures on Facebook of how he moulded the latest Frothers Charity Figure.

I thought it a nice summary of the steps. There used to be some nice tutorials about Mould making online but with the way the internet changes I've lost all my old links.

Note that he has only done the mold with one figure cavity. A 9" diameter mould can hold about 15 or so  28mm figures (depending upon the poses) so normally a Master Mould is made once you get together that many "greens". You then make the master mould and from there you make "x" number of Production Moulds.

How many Production moulds? Well, that depends. You could spin the Master Mould 15 or 16 times and then make a Production Mould (with 15 or 16 figures on it) for each of the greens you had sculpted. This has advantages when running production as it is easy to get the quantities required. The downside is you spend more on moulds. Or you could put 4 or 5 copies of 3 or 4 greens on each mould. This takes less production moulds but also means that each time you spin the mould you get the other figures as well - which you might not want. Now you can throw the metal back in the pot and remelt it but each time you spin the mold wears it out. So you could spin the mold lots of times to get a few particular figures and end up wearing out the mould for other figures at the same time...

What I've found is that deciding on how to do the Production Moulds is no easy thing...

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    It looks very complex, whats the easy way to do the Production Moulds.

    Regards,
    Brenda,
    Ayva packaging

    ReplyDelete