Thread: Cloning celluloid scales: a work in progress

The heat thing seems a little low to me. If it could withstand a little more heat would be better but your very close. Ive been following along and your doing great with this. Congrads on getting this far. Soon you will have it all figured out and will be popping out scales left and right.

Nice work, Zak! Way to stick with it!
You definitely have the mold thing going-on. They all look super!

Originally Posted by Gasman

The heat thing seems a little low to me. If it could withstand a little more heat would be better but your very close. Ive been following along and your doing great with this. Congrads on getting this far. Soon you will have it all figured out and will be popping out scales left and right.

The temperature thing isn't as bad as it sounds, and I'm hoping that given 3-4 days and a really solid cure, it will be even less of an issue.

If not, I suppose I'll have to move to pressure-casting and one of the urethane resins.

Glad those batch is looking more hopeful. I always thought of acrylic as being harder and didn't realize you could get acrylic resins that would be so soft after curing. I guess most of those acrylic resins are manufactured in pressure tanks.

Did clay/wax not work for filling the scratches in the originals? Are you going to need something harder like CA?

Originally Posted by JP5

Glad those batch is looking more hopeful. I always thought of acrylic as being harder and didn't realize you could get acrylic resins that would be so soft after curing. I guess most of those acrylic resins are manufactured in pressure tanks.

Did clay/wax not work for filling the scratches in the originals? Are you going to need something harder like CA?

I jumped the gun with the mold that featured corrections to the scales and poured resin in before it was fully cured. So when I took the resin out, chunks of mold came with it.

I haven't tried CA, but I suspect it'll dissolve the celluloid.

There's a freshly poured mold on a much more comprehensively corrected pair of scales. Gonna give that a full two days to cure and then I'll see where we're at.

With another day of time, the Epoxacast 690 is set up really rigid (but not brittle). Hot tap water will make it flexible though. Meh. It does return mostly to its original shape when it cools though, and that same heat flexibility means it's also really easy to straighten back out... But I think this does mean I'm going to have to move to the urethanes.