How to Mold and Cast a Lightsaber!

The Art and Science of Resin Casting: A Hands-On Experiment with a Lightsaber Mold

As we begin our latest project, I'm excited to share my experience and knowledge on resin casting. I've brought some resin with me today, which is smooth and ready for use. We'll be working with a 45D scale, which refers to the barometer used in ancient times to measure atmospheric pressure. This scale was widely used by sailors and traders, and it's fascinating to see how it relates to our modern understanding of weather patterns.

As we prepare to cast our resin, I want to explain the different scales used for measuring materials. The D scale is for rigid objects, while the T scale is for soft, flexible materials. And then there's the double O scale, which is used for gels that are extremely soft and pliable. Our resin falls under the T category, making it suitable for casting delicate and intricate designs.

Now, let's talk about mixing the resin. I'm not entirely sure how much to add to the mold, so we'll be eyeballing it. One common technique is to use a ratio of resin to hardener that works well for this specific type of resin. I've also heard of using rice or sand as a measuring tool to ensure accurate proportions.

As I pour the resin into the mold, I want to create a smooth, even surface. The ridges on the mold will help to distribute the resin evenly and prevent air bubbles from forming. If we're lucky, we might even get some texture in our casting! We can also add color to the resin by mixing different pigments or using pre-made resins that already have added colors.

The resin has a work time of around 5-6 minutes, followed by a cure time of about 30 minutes. This means we'll need to wait for a bit before opening up our mold and revealing the finished casting. To speed up the process, we can try applying heat or using a pressure tank, but these tools aren't always available.

As I roll out the resin and smooth it into the corners of the mold, I'm excited to see how this will turn out. The rubber bands at the bottom of the mold are there to help distribute the weight of the resin evenly and prevent sagging or warping. If we're lucky, our casting might even be free of air bubbles!

As I wait for the resin to cure, I take a moment to appreciate the process we're undertaking. Resin casting is an art that requires patience, experimentation, and a willingness to learn from mistakes. And with each project, we can refine our techniques and push the boundaries of what's possible.

When we finally open up our mold, we'll be met with the sight of our very own resin lightsaber casting. I'm excited to see how it turns out and what kind of nuances we might discover in the process. We might need to sand down some bubbles or add a primer coat before finishing it off with paint. Who knows? Maybe we can even get vacuum analyzed or chromed to give it that extra special something.

For those interested in trying their hand at resin casting, I recommend experimenting with different materials and techniques. Each mold will have its unique characteristics, and learning to work with these nuances is an essential part of the process. And if you're feeling adventurous, we might even try making a few copies of this casting to create multiple lightsabers!

As we wrap up our experiment, I want to thank our premium members for joining us on this journey into the world of resin casting. If you haven't already subscribed to our channel, be sure to check it out and join us for more how-to tutorials, project showcases, and behind-the-scenes insights into the world of special effects.

And who knows? Maybe one day we'll even get to create a full-fledged lightsaber, complete with sound effects and visual effects. The possibilities are endless when it comes to resin casting, and I'm thrilled to be exploring this medium with all of you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's norm from Testim welcome to another how-to project with Frank Ippolito brought to you by tested premium members check out our memberships that's what allows us to make these videos show you how to cool things if you've watched a series before we've done a few projects with Frank ready we created an easy like one sided mold for a 3d printed objects where we create those we've recreated my hand using an alginate mold and today we want to take one step further a little more complex we're doing a two-sided mold yep two-part mold two-part mold so why would someone need to make a two-part mold if you have something that you can't just glue down to the table and dump rubber on you need to have both sides of it and maybe you want to have it so that it opens up so the piece Dee molds easier if there's like little undercuts or complicated parts that you can't just yank it straight out so if someone's a prop maker for example and they make a space pistol or an elaborate problem doesn't have a flat bottom edge or if you wanted to make like a hammer or a wrench that was made out of rubber yeah if you want it you know for a prop like a stunt prop Sun casting like a rubber prop yeah that's that's using the movies all the time well we're going to recreate a prop today that I think it's really cool this is weird Adams shop obviously and Adams allowed us to recreate something he made himself it's not a space pistols a space sword it's a lightsaber it's a lightsaber did you wear this shirt on purpose today of happy coincidences around this is Luke's lightsaber for my belief Return of the Jedi and what Adam told me was he made this himself based on references from a 1995 Star Wars prop tour exhibit in San Francisco he actually that's that was right before the the prequels came out and he went to the exhibit George Lucas donated all these props to it he took a ton of photos and this is one of his I guess the lights of where he made back then when he was ILM is this the right kind of thing that we want to create a two-part mold if we were if we were to just glue it down and dump rubber on here it wouldn't come out of the castings really good because all these little undercuts and all these little ridges so it's the best if you want to part mold on this alright so I presume like the other moles of one part mole we need it's gonna be some type of silicone a molding material and and then your honor if I also want to create a shell for it yeah what's the first step first step is we are gonna clay this up so that we're only going to pour rubber on the first half so what we'll do is we'll take this foam core mm-hmm and I've decided that I want to put this on on one side of the mold so that I'm not making a seam line across this this will just come straight out the top right where is in one part mold you don't have a seam line unless you cut the mold open because it's the flat base is where you tear it out we're gonna get a seam line yeah once you start getting in a two-part mold you have to think about how it's gonna do mold when where you're gonna pour the resin in like we're gonna pour the resin in this flat bottom area which is really easy you know we're how the resin is gonna flow and where it's gonna go into like obviously pouring it from this end is gonna be pretty easy because we could just kind of roll it around you can get rid of air bubbles and then like where the seam line is gonna go like is it gonna cause any problems with casting cause any problems with the molding the original and that's one of those things that like over a little bit of experience and kind of looking at other people's molds and kind of researching how molds are made you can kind of learn how to find your parting lines and how to find on their cuts with silicone is really forgiving so if I don't get the the parting line right on the top edge if it's a little bit one way or the other it's not gonna like break the mold okay so it's real easy to start off with silicone because it's forgiving okay all right so you have a space and you talked about creating a clay so the molds of two halves of the mold isn't are created one at a time yeah we have to put clay to separate the first side that we're gonna pour okay we're gonna flip it over pull that clay off and pour the second side got it so I'm using a water-based clay just because I can work really fast with it you can also use soft oil-based clay tzer's the company is not in business anymore but it was called clean clay but a bunch of other companies have made replicas of that clay now it's an oil-based it doesn't dry out this one's a water-based clay it'll dry out so I'm just gonna plow through it and get it done right now you don't want to let this sit necessarily overnight and come back because it'll dry and crack so I know that I want to split this right all right but the center so I'm just gonna build up clay up to the center and this is really this the support structure so that when you make the mole on Emporia or silicon which is what the mold material is gonna be that's what fills in all the nooks and crannies the clay right now doesn't need to fill up all those crazy at all this clay is only to separate the back I mean this is a pretty simple object because it's just it's just round so finding the halfway point is really easy how important is it for it to be at the exactly the halfway point or it for it to be like an a smooth line of straight line across one of the sides you want this parting line to be ninety degrees out of the park and again this is easy because it's a cylinder to find the center and then to make it 90 degrees from the center point but you know sometimes things get more complicated as as the models get more complicated it's really soft yeah when you're using a clay to make these dividing walls that it goes quicker if you have a soft clay which is why that the clean clay stuff the oil-based version is also like a super soft clay you know unless they want to use like a really hard like sculpting clay you can but it's easier to have something soft and malleable that you can just lay up these dividing walls really quickly Rick I can see as you're smoothing this play out it's kind of bunching up closer on the edge of model yeah that's obviously something you don't want as a pretty girl old so this tool what I'm using is it's just a steel spatula that I'm using just to smooth out and get the lines even like I'm looking at it low so I can make sure that they're 90 degrees 90 degrees and make sure it's smooth the next thing I'm going to come in with is have a couple of these rubber tip tools and then since they're rubber they kind of flex a little bit and those are the tools that I'll use just to go right up against the model so that way I'm not scratching it your excess yeah these work really good like if you're molding a clay sculpture and you don't want to like mess it up use these real soft tools to just kind of clean up that last a little bit of your parting edge does it really matter what the material the object you want to create a mold of is made out of when you're creating the ball in terms of the side a your mold material and in the clay reason there's I mean there's different different things you have to take into consideration depending on what the material is and what the what your what what material gonna mold with and what material you're molding of when what you're casting of look you have to think about all those things for the most part you know using this water clay or a really soft oil-based clay is kind of an easy go to all right now that you used the these rubber tools to smooth out some of the edges you're taking a sponge to it yeah I have a like a triangle cut makeup sponge and some water I'm just kind of smoothing out some of these areas you can also use a brush with some water or you know whatever but I just happen to have a makeup sponge it needs to be silicone tight yeah you don't want any little gaps between the clay and your your model because I'm a silicone will leak through so I see your seam lines it's perfectly smooth this is flat you've brushed over with water that's hot part which is giving the first part your hand hold on you think need to be really clean yeah the cleaner you make it the better your molds going to fit together okay there's two things we got to we still have to do we have to build walls to contain the silicone that we're gonna pour on here yep and then we also have to make registration so that the front side of the silicone links up with the back side so that's something that it's specific to a multi-part mold yeah it's registration and that means and that means that when you if you just have two pieces of floppy silicone they might not line up so we want to make little keys in there so that they do line up all right interlocking parts yeah so I'll take the back side of this tool which is just a nice little rounded nub mm-hmm I just dip it in a little bit of water and put it in there it makes these little divots so in terms of how much registration do you need and also how close can that these keyholes be to the edge of the prop I don't want to put them right on top of the prop like these are probably 3/16 quarter inch away okay but I'm gonna go all the way around because what I want is that little edge of the of the of the mold I don't want it to shift so if I put all these little registrations on here it's less likely to shift and then you know surveys and then get a step in the mold because you don't want the mold to miss a line and then your piece has a step in it if you keep the end of the tool a little bit wet it keeps it from sticking and it just makes it a nicer little dot how deep should these reservation holes be I've seen people use things like bolt heads or like half spheres you know it depends what you want to do like whatever you feel most comfortable with these are probably less than a quarter inch deep so this will get good edge registration but once I put these walls up here I may put another piece of another ribbon registration on there just so it has multiple things that kind of make the silicone hold together and so don't want to grab each other the two halves I don't want to grab it in the registration holes so he doesn't need to be so deep yeah it'll help it just helps for alignment so what I'll do is I'll just take a piece of foam core to serve as a straight edge okay and my little metal tool and I'm just gonna cut this excess clay off is this clay reusable yeah I've seen people take it and reuse it once you put crystal-clear on it and you start putting rubber in it then sometimes it'll get contaminated but I've seen people use like pick that stuff out and reuse it it's really cheap I think a 50-pound boxes like 20 bucks so it's not expensive at all all right time to add some walls so the next thing hot-glue brought my hot glue gun this time so the next thing we'll do is we'll we'll just hot glue these foam core strips to the sides to build walls goodness for foam-core the best material mm-hmm alright your walls were in I noticed you're trying to seal that clay against the wall so the Sloane has a fuller on the edges yes unnecessary and you really want a tight seal I guess between the foam core of the clay and also the problem yeah you don't want silicone leaking anywhere you don't need it so I still have a little bit of space here between this dot registration and my walls so what I'm gonna not make more or dot registration well I'm not going to do that registration I'm gonna do like ribbons this time ah so I have a little loop tool and I just make a little wavy line that just adds another little bit of registration the first layer of locking and then the second layer of locking yep this is more kind of broad stroke registration all right before you pour the slow cone you'll do one more thing I want to seal this water clay with some crystal clear okay so I'm just gonna put a couple of light coats on there it'll go on the model too but it's fine this is a glassy model if you want something if you're gonna mold something that's got a matte finish you could always say with some matte finish from Kryolan or dulling spray both of those things also work if you need to take something take the shine off of something but this is just to seal it just to help the water clay pull out of the silicone easier okay okay that clearcoat set yep I'll Drive all right and of course you can always rub it off the prop later with alcohol you can take a little bit alcohol and take anything off so you're not doing the apartment you haven't anything and then the silicone so this is a very familiar silicone yeah this is 20 T which is the same stuff that we use to mould the hand us the cast the hand cast the handy right correct yeah where that project this is the silicone to make the fake hand yeah this is actually gonna be the mold material yes you can use materials for molding or casting it just depends what you want to do with them so they're kind of universal in silicone of course the only slow count yep so it won't stick to any of this awesome so I've weighed out two batches of silicone already I put a little bit of blue pigment in one of them just when I stir it I can see that it's all mixed really good okay as soon as I mix it I'm gonna run over to the evacuator over there and putting in the and I'm gonna put this whole thing in the vacuum chamber what that does is it sucks all the air that I've whipped into it when I'm mixing it so that we want to pour it the only air that's gonna be in there stuff that's just gonna naturally rise out for the most part people aren't gonna have a huge deal without evacuating the silicone I know that I'm probably going to want to pressure cast these things which means I'm gonna put this mold into a pressure tank and put positive pressure on the resin when I cast it and if I have a silicone that has that hasn't been degassed which is what this is called then it'll get little divots and they'll have an imperfect casting so I want to evacuate the silicone if I'm going to do a pressure casting now the fastest minutes fast explained all right the half the mold is now poured in in this frame give the way about 30 minutes hmm but let's talk about this process how did you know exactly how much silicone porn here for this half that's simple math simple math length times width times height right in inches in inches 18 point 5 which is what we figured out a volumetric square cubic inch of silicon is the number we came up with our nose when I was working at McFarlane Toys and that gives us how many grams of total material we need gave me about 1,900 grams for this I took a little bit out because the light saber takes up a little bit of it so I guessed about 1800 grams and then I divide that by 2 and that's how many grams in each cup I weighed out that's brilliant let's recap that figure out the volume of the box yes by inches yes so for example if it was a 2 by 2 by 2 box that's 8 cubic inches yeah multiply that by well you figure it out for a silicon 18.5 I do that and that isn't grams you want mass yes so you weigh out that and that is your total total volume volume yep and then you divide that by 2 for each of the halves partly correct and then you can estimate out how much volume you think you're gonna lose in the part that's in there very cool and that came out just about right so we'll come back in the third in 30 minutes and deal out the half yep thirty minutes later half of its done yes examine the silicon oh that's rock-solid well summer solid rubber solid so this smooth on Moltke start sweetie mm-hmm thirty minutes that time anything about a six minute working time yes she's gonna make really quick casts or molds with this thing yeah but your new a project in one day it's the right thing we use it's how to do it alright so what's next to get the other side so what I want to do is I want to take these walls off and not destroy them because I'm gonna use them again to do the poor the other side hmm so we need to tear one side off and it's just pop off that silicone yeah so I'm just kind of carefully pull them off it's like baking a cake you have layers of things yeah why not all right all four sides are off examine it you have this top layer of silicone great and the clay on the bottom and Stella's flip it around yes so I'll take another piece of foam cord just cuz it's clean I'll flip this guy over okay pull that off and then carefully just kind of take the clay off I don't want to dislodge the lightsaber from the silicone mm-hmm I just want to take the clay off and the clay is still malleable it's it's still putty like it hasn't hardened yet and yes you're holding the prop down and then just tearing that off bit by bit I like the registration marks so Frank the thing we're mulling right now is fairly even though it's a two sided mold it's still fairly simple object cylindrical I imagine if someone sculpted something with more detail you know overhangs larger pieces would it still be the same process it's basically the same process you just have to determine where your parting line is gonna be mm-hmm but again that goes to how you want to cast it how the mold gets flipped over how the part comes out of it you know there's a lot of different kind of variables to that but you know for basics like just molding 101 doing a two-part this is a good way to start I've also seen a lot of people that instead of using this foam core I've seen em use Lego bricks okay to build their walls that way the walls are kind of the same size every time the only thing I don't like about that is a lot of times it'll leave like those little brick lines mm-hmm and I just like nice clean molds it's just a personal preference but those things work really well also if you want something that's reusable so you don't have to like waste foam core all the time got it I've also made mold walls out of like wood if I'm doing a larger mold the weight of the silicone could become a factor and you don't want it to like you know bend over the walls of the foam core so you could build the box out of wood also I mean basically there's a bazillion ways to do any of these things this is just like one version one kind of intro to how to do it and then you can look up all the different methods and figure out which one might be best for your project so right now you're scraping off this clay just like when you were preparing the other site for the silicone mold pour you want this to be real clean yeah not just on top of that prop but also on top of the bottom half okay break out that sponge mm-hmm once I get most of the big chunks of clay out I'll use a little bit of water and the sponge to rinse it all off alright that looks like a pretty clean mold the bottom there model is clean of course we use some Adams tools here it's a to blow off any of the excess residue but you can just patting it down with paper cleaning off a move yeah make it dry mm-hmm so next thing we want to do is put these walls back up and we'll just kind of reuse all this stuff okay so I'm pretty much just checking the corners to make sure that silicone isn't going to leak out between the walls just because these are kind of repurposed pieces of foam core mm-hmm they're a little crooked so I just want to make sure they're all sealed up all right so that's put back together and then we'll get it a little spray of crystal clear again the crystal clear is gonna put make a barrier on the silicone so the silicone doesn't stick to itself the guy you can also use spray releases and stuff so when you're casting when you need crystal clear every time you make a casts make sure the two sides don't stick no because the mold will be cured and be separate it's a good idea to have some mold release you you know the cast your piece in there the mold will last a little bit longer if you use a release nice that's a pretty perfect fit Frank yeah you didn't you did the math did the math well you've a little bit extra we're just saying earlier it might be good practice to you know maybe make up one sided mold if easy to pour something into if you have extra yeah work on two projects at the same time the other thing you can do is a lot of times I'll leave this rubber in the bottom of a bucket and you could pull it out and you can use it as like a bondo mixing pad or right things like that so this is still useful silicone again nothing sticks to it so it's almost like a flat surface you'd have work on em hmm when I was doing the evacuator you put the vacuum on mm-hmm and it rises up and it starts bubbling and then I had a like let some air in a little bit just because it would have overflowed the bucket so you let the air in just a little bit and then eventually it'll collapse in on itself and that's when you know that it's completely evacuated so it rises up and then it drops back down so when you mix up silicone or any kind of material and you want to put it in evacuator you always want to have a bucket that's at least twice the size twice the size of how much you have the volume things that you have in there well 30 minutes for this the set yep then we'll open it up and open up and cast something right we got a mold this is done Wow it's it's filled up so perfectly giant block of rubber shy block of two halves yeah so now we open it like Christmas D molding Christmas don't you want to help oh yes oh can i I was s permission oh it's those cookies Swedes tear apart this wall tear down this foam core wall foam core walls of oppression all right there we go two colors two halves I'm gonna just take a guess it's why you don't use Lego box yeah cuz if it's Lego blocks you get all kinds of lines there these are just all nice and smooth it's an aesthetic thing so then moms all cleaned up oh no two part you just separate it that's it I think it's like clear coat mm-hmm oh look at the registration there's some door thing light saber so yeah that's the two halves well that's great look at leas negatives Wow all right let's check the lightsaber this looks good see some of the clay here this will just was give this one I swept down with alcohol clean up the molds there so there we go now we have the two halves of the molds but we need to fill it somewhere if you notice I didn't put any registration right down the gray end is that littler that you're gonna pour it's never gonna cast yep we're gonna pour so I'm just gonna take this so I'm just gonna cut a little Channel okay doesn't give you that big right mm-hmm doesn't matter which side I'm gonna cut both sides both sides you want to kind of plan these molds beforehand this is a fairly simple straightforward thing so to put the pour spout down here where it's a flat place that you can just cut that off and stand it flat makes it really easy if you have a more complicated thing that has details on all ends you have to kind of pick and choose where you're going to put your porch pop as we talked about earlier you chose it here because the gravity will help and you'll be able to swirl whatever you cast inside to make sure you have no air bubbles so before we get to casting do we need to do any cleanup on the inside of the mold yeah it probably gonna wipe it down with a little bit of rubbing alcohol just to get any residue out of here like there might be a little bit of residue from the crystal clear mm-hmm or a little bit of residue from just little bits of clay that might still be right here somewhere if I was making more production mold I would spend a lot more time on that wall to make it perfect we're gonna have to clean up the piece when we pull it out yet but flashing yeah but that's just all about spending more time on the mold it spending more time on that wall so the better the better you get that wall that line between the first half of the second half and whether you made that clay the closer it is the prop the less work you put on yourself afterward you transmitted cleanup yeah of your cast so now we have molds it's time to cast something in them yep with so a silicone mold what can you cast what type of materials you can cast urethanes epoxies polyesters like all kinds of things if you're gonna cast silicone you have to use certain releases because silicone sticks to silicone and we need to release you mean like a spray or application yeah that coats each of the sides yeah and different releases work with different products you got to look at all the information and stuff like that if I was gonna cast silicone in here I would probably use like easily 300 or or just dish soap you can take dish soap and just work it up into a lather and that's usually good enough release you just want to create a barrier so what are we casting in here today well these molds are a little or floppy as silicone is so what we did is we cut some pieces of wood so when we put these together we'll strap it with wood and that'll keep it rigid and it'll keep it even pressure because I don't want to take a mold and I want to clamp it like here and here and here because then it'll pinch it so if you put it on a piece of wood it'll give it even pressure all the way around when you strap it together nice and looks like we have some resin over there yep just rubber band these together so we're talking about the proper care of a mold like this mold using silicone you said it lasts up to maybe like 50 times from Cassim if you treat it well if you treat it well you'd you know you've used resins that aren't gonna get super hot and burn out the mold mm-hmm this means a longer setting resin usually yeah these are platinum silicones so this one will probably last longer than like a tin based silicone so just you know things like that can help you make a mold last longer using spray releases you can use like these release 200 or a lot of other things just to help you know keep down the wear and tear on the molds about it so that's all strapped up I brought some resin this is smooth cast 45 d 45 is the barometer on a D scale which goes back to write all of our right so then we talked about this this here this is 20 T yeah and that's 20 on the t skin no no the T stands for translucent ah how's a scale is for soft things D scale is for rigid things and then there's a double O scale which is for gels real soft really soft okay so I'll mix up some resin not a hundred percent sure how much goes in there well eyeball it there's all kinds of ways that you can estimate how much resin to go in there you could put rice in there or sand or water or all kinds of things to ask me we're just gonna go for it okay highballing by volume so because it has all these ridges yeah I'm gonna pour in some and I'm gonna kind of roll it around which will kind of coat the inside of the mold you can kind of help it so that it hopefully doesn't trap as many air bubbles now we evacuated this residence we can also put in a pressure tank but Adam doesn't have a pressure tank here it's okay just a wait that'll wait and have you know maybe minor air bubbles and the resin give it a textured look if you're using a resin that's clear you can mix colors in it or we can just finish it later alright you've poured in the resin anything this resin you had a lot of five six minute work time yeah and then another 30 minutes of cure time yeah and you can get resins with different work times this just happened to be the one that I grabbed okay so let's come back in 30 minutes and then pop this open see the right sailor cool right now so descendants I'm excited I'm so excited like Christmas all over again oh let's break this mole open so a lot of rubber rants added I notice that you stacked more rubber bands at the bottom yeah cuz that's where whatever you're going to cast the same resin silicon gravity is gonna push that to the bone yeah you're gonna have a hydraulic pressure and so you're probably gonna want a couple more at the bottom and it's okay if you know the some stuff seeps out in very beginning first casting out of the mold you you have to learn some of the nuances of how the mold right so we might open this and we might go oh there's some air bubbles we need to do something different next classic could it could be empty ya never know Schrodinger I wasn't casting right now there we go that's pretty good you know maybe next time we'll add some pigment to the resin yep or try baby different material yeah urethane but this is that's a little warmth a little warm it's still not all the way done but this here is our resin lightsaber casting and let's get up close here because you can see like right here just some of that flashing tiny bit not and this can be cleaned up yes send it down sand it down take a file you know no problem there's a little bit of bubbles up there but again when we run the next one maybe when I put that last little bit in there I roll this end you can see I rolled all these and there's not really much of any air trapped up here which is where I was worried but I didn't roll this last little bit so right when I do that just roll the mold a little bit learn the nuances of every mold you're making but for a first casting I'd say that that's you know B plus B plus I would grade yourself what can you do to finish something like this kind of resin well I mean you'd want to sand it and maybe primer it and then you can paint it with just about whatever you want if we were gonna give it a finish like this we might want to send it to get vacuum analyzed or chromed mm-hmm you need a machine you Machine one hit make I make a lot of copies of copies because we can make a rubber one and that way you can hit people with it if only Luka knew it was so easy I'm thinking I'm returning the Jedi thank you so much Frank expressionist two-part mold now we have this mold so we can just experiment different materials different castings and thank you tested premium members for bringing this video series to test it well more how-to more projects in the future subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't yet and check that on testing comm racketboy dose website Franco calm topic calm I'm norm it's Frank Joey Sheen add special effects this right yeah give me a lightsaber well I'll give you I'll give you the sound effects you do the visual effects wall and we'll make it green make sure it's great with the clues youhey it's norm from Testim welcome to another how-to project with Frank Ippolito brought to you by tested premium members check out our memberships that's what allows us to make these videos show you how to cool things if you've watched a series before we've done a few projects with Frank ready we created an easy like one sided mold for a 3d printed objects where we create those we've recreated my hand using an alginate mold and today we want to take one step further a little more complex we're doing a two-sided mold yep two-part mold two-part mold so why would someone need to make a two-part mold if you have something that you can't just glue down to the table and dump rubber on you need to have both sides of it and maybe you want to have it so that it opens up so the piece Dee molds easier if there's like little undercuts or complicated parts that you can't just yank it straight out so if someone's a prop maker for example and they make a space pistol or an elaborate problem doesn't have a flat bottom edge or if you wanted to make like a hammer or a wrench that was made out of rubber yeah if you want it you know for a prop like a stunt prop Sun casting like a rubber prop yeah that's that's using the movies all the time well we're going to recreate a prop today that I think it's really cool this is weird Adams shop obviously and Adams allowed us to recreate something he made himself it's not a space pistols a space sword it's a lightsaber it's a lightsaber did you wear this shirt on purpose today of happy coincidences around this is Luke's lightsaber for my belief Return of the Jedi and what Adam told me was he made this himself based on references from a 1995 Star Wars prop tour exhibit in San Francisco he actually that's that was right before the the prequels came out and he went to the exhibit George Lucas donated all these props to it he took a ton of photos and this is one of his I guess the lights of where he made back then when he was ILM is this the right kind of thing that we want to create a two-part mold if we were if we were to just glue it down and dump rubber on here it wouldn't come out of the castings really good because all these little undercuts and all these little ridges so it's the best if you want to part mold on this alright so I presume like the other moles of one part mole we need it's gonna be some type of silicone a molding material and and then your honor if I also want to create a shell for it yeah what's the first step first step is we are gonna clay this up so that we're only going to pour rubber on the first half so what we'll do is we'll take this foam core mm-hmm and I've decided that I want to put this on on one side of the mold so that I'm not making a seam line across this this will just come straight out the top right where is in one part mold you don't have a seam line unless you cut the mold open because it's the flat base is where you tear it out we're gonna get a seam line yeah once you start getting in a two-part mold you have to think about how it's gonna do mold when where you're gonna pour the resin in like we're gonna pour the resin in this flat bottom area which is really easy you know we're how the resin is gonna flow and where it's gonna go into like obviously pouring it from this end is gonna be pretty easy because we could just kind of roll it around you can get rid of air bubbles and then like where the seam line is gonna go like is it gonna cause any problems with casting cause any problems with the molding the original and that's one of those things that like over a little bit of experience and kind of looking at other people's molds and kind of researching how molds are made you can kind of learn how to find your parting lines and how to find on their cuts with silicone is really forgiving so if I don't get the the parting line right on the top edge if it's a little bit one way or the other it's not gonna like break the mold okay so it's real easy to start off with silicone because it's forgiving okay all right so you have a space and you talked about creating a clay so the molds of two halves of the mold isn't are created one at a time yeah we have to put clay to separate the first side that we're gonna pour okay we're gonna flip it over pull that clay off and pour the second side got it so I'm using a water-based clay just because I can work really fast with it you can also use soft oil-based clay tzer's the company is not in business anymore but it was called clean clay but a bunch of other companies have made replicas of that clay now it's an oil-based it doesn't dry out this one's a water-based clay it'll dry out so I'm just gonna plow through it and get it done right now you don't want to let this sit necessarily overnight and come back because it'll dry and crack so I know that I want to split this right all right but the center so I'm just gonna build up clay up to the center and this is really this the support structure so that when you make the mole on Emporia or silicon which is what the mold material is gonna be that's what fills in all the nooks and crannies the clay right now doesn't need to fill up all those crazy at all this clay is only to separate the back I mean this is a pretty simple object because it's just it's just round so finding the halfway point is really easy how important is it for it to be at the exactly the halfway point or it for it to be like an a smooth line of straight line across one of the sides you want this parting line to be ninety degrees out of the park and again this is easy because it's a cylinder to find the center and then to make it 90 degrees from the center point but you know sometimes things get more complicated as as the models get more complicated it's really soft yeah when you're using a clay to make these dividing walls that it goes quicker if you have a soft clay which is why that the clean clay stuff the oil-based version is also like a super soft clay you know unless they want to use like a really hard like sculpting clay you can but it's easier to have something soft and malleable that you can just lay up these dividing walls really quickly Rick I can see as you're smoothing this play out it's kind of bunching up closer on the edge of model yeah that's obviously something you don't want as a pretty girl old so this tool what I'm using is it's just a steel spatula that I'm using just to smooth out and get the lines even like I'm looking at it low so I can make sure that they're 90 degrees 90 degrees and make sure it's smooth the next thing I'm going to come in with is have a couple of these rubber tip tools and then since they're rubber they kind of flex a little bit and those are the tools that I'll use just to go right up against the model so that way I'm not scratching it your excess yeah these work really good like if you're molding a clay sculpture and you don't want to like mess it up use these real soft tools to just kind of clean up that last a little bit of your parting edge does it really matter what the material the object you want to create a mold of is made out of when you're creating the ball in terms of the side a your mold material and in the clay reason there's I mean there's different different things you have to take into consideration depending on what the material is and what the what your what what material gonna mold with and what material you're molding of when what you're casting of look you have to think about all those things for the most part you know using this water clay or a really soft oil-based clay is kind of an easy go to all right now that you used the these rubber tools to smooth out some of the edges you're taking a sponge to it yeah I have a like a triangle cut makeup sponge and some water I'm just kind of smoothing out some of these areas you can also use a brush with some water or you know whatever but I just happen to have a makeup sponge it needs to be silicone tight yeah you don't want any little gaps between the clay and your your model because I'm a silicone will leak through so I see your seam lines it's perfectly smooth this is flat you've brushed over with water that's hot part which is giving the first part your hand hold on you think need to be really clean yeah the cleaner you make it the better your molds going to fit together okay there's two things we got to we still have to do we have to build walls to contain the silicone that we're gonna pour on here yep and then we also have to make registration so that the front side of the silicone links up with the back side so that's something that it's specific to a multi-part mold yeah it's registration and that means and that means that when you if you just have two pieces of floppy silicone they might not line up so we want to make little keys in there so that they do line up all right interlocking parts yeah so I'll take the back side of this tool which is just a nice little rounded nub mm-hmm I just dip it in a little bit of water and put it in there it makes these little divots so in terms of how much registration do you need and also how close can that these keyholes be to the edge of the prop I don't want to put them right on top of the prop like these are probably 3/16 quarter inch away okay but I'm gonna go all the way around because what I want is that little edge of the of the of the mold I don't want it to shift so if I put all these little registrations on here it's less likely to shift and then you know surveys and then get a step in the mold because you don't want the mold to miss a line and then your piece has a step in it if you keep the end of the tool a little bit wet it keeps it from sticking and it just makes it a nicer little dot how deep should these reservation holes be I've seen people use things like bolt heads or like half spheres you know it depends what you want to do like whatever you feel most comfortable with these are probably less than a quarter inch deep so this will get good edge registration but once I put these walls up here I may put another piece of another ribbon registration on there just so it has multiple things that kind of make the silicone hold together and so don't want to grab each other the two halves I don't want to grab it in the registration holes so he doesn't need to be so deep yeah it'll help it just helps for alignment so what I'll do is I'll just take a piece of foam core to serve as a straight edge okay and my little metal tool and I'm just gonna cut this excess clay off is this clay reusable yeah I've seen people take it and reuse it once you put crystal-clear on it and you start putting rubber in it then sometimes it'll get contaminated but I've seen people use like pick that stuff out and reuse it it's really cheap I think a 50-pound boxes like 20 bucks so it's not expensive at all all right time to add some walls so the next thing hot-glue brought my hot glue gun this time so the next thing we'll do is we'll we'll just hot glue these foam core strips to the sides to build walls goodness for foam-core the best material mm-hmm alright your walls were in I noticed you're trying to seal that clay against the wall so the Sloane has a fuller on the edges yes unnecessary and you really want a tight seal I guess between the foam core of the clay and also the problem yeah you don't want silicone leaking anywhere you don't need it so I still have a little bit of space here between this dot registration and my walls so what I'm gonna not make more or dot registration well I'm not going to do that registration I'm gonna do like ribbons this time ah so I have a little loop tool and I just make a little wavy line that just adds another little bit of registration the first layer of locking and then the second layer of locking yep this is more kind of broad stroke registration all right before you pour the slow cone you'll do one more thing I want to seal this water clay with some crystal clear okay so I'm just gonna put a couple of light coats on there it'll go on the model too but it's fine this is a glassy model if you want something if you're gonna mold something that's got a matte finish you could always say with some matte finish from Kryolan or dulling spray both of those things also work if you need to take something take the shine off of something but this is just to seal it just to help the water clay pull out of the silicone easier okay okay that clearcoat set yep I'll Drive all right and of course you can always rub it off the prop later with alcohol you can take a little bit alcohol and take anything off so you're not doing the apartment you haven't anything and then the silicone so this is a very familiar silicone yeah this is 20 T which is the same stuff that we use to mould the hand us the cast the hand cast the handy right correct yeah where that project this is the silicone to make the fake hand yeah this is actually gonna be the mold material yes you can use materials for molding or casting it just depends what you want to do with them so they're kind of universal in silicone of course the only slow count yep so it won't stick to any of this awesome so I've weighed out two batches of silicone already I put a little bit of blue pigment in one of them just when I stir it I can see that it's all mixed really good okay as soon as I mix it I'm gonna run over to the evacuator over there and putting in the and I'm gonna put this whole thing in the vacuum chamber what that does is it sucks all the air that I've whipped into it when I'm mixing it so that we want to pour it the only air that's gonna be in there stuff that's just gonna naturally rise out for the most part people aren't gonna have a huge deal without evacuating the silicone I know that I'm probably going to want to pressure cast these things which means I'm gonna put this mold into a pressure tank and put positive pressure on the resin when I cast it and if I have a silicone that has that hasn't been degassed which is what this is called then it'll get little divots and they'll have an imperfect casting so I want to evacuate the silicone if I'm going to do a pressure casting now the fastest minutes fast explained all right the half the mold is now poured in in this frame give the way about 30 minutes hmm but let's talk about this process how did you know exactly how much silicone porn here for this half that's simple math simple math length times width times height right in inches in inches 18 point 5 which is what we figured out a volumetric square cubic inch of silicon is the number we came up with our nose when I was working at McFarlane Toys and that gives us how many grams of total material we need gave me about 1,900 grams for this I took a little bit out because the light saber takes up a little bit of it so I guessed about 1800 grams and then I divide that by 2 and that's how many grams in each cup I weighed out that's brilliant let's recap that figure out the volume of the box yes by inches yes so for example if it was a 2 by 2 by 2 box that's 8 cubic inches yeah multiply that by well you figure it out for a silicon 18.5 I do that and that isn't grams you want mass yes so you weigh out that and that is your total total volume volume yep and then you divide that by 2 for each of the halves partly correct and then you can estimate out how much volume you think you're gonna lose in the part that's in there very cool and that came out just about right so we'll come back in the third in 30 minutes and deal out the half yep thirty minutes later half of its done yes examine the silicon oh that's rock-solid well summer solid rubber solid so this smooth on Moltke start sweetie mm-hmm thirty minutes that time anything about a six minute working time yes she's gonna make really quick casts or molds with this thing yeah but your new a project in one day it's the right thing we use it's how to do it alright so what's next to get the other side so what I want to do is I want to take these walls off and not destroy them because I'm gonna use them again to do the poor the other side hmm so we need to tear one side off and it's just pop off that silicone yeah so I'm just kind of carefully pull them off it's like baking a cake you have layers of things yeah why not all right all four sides are off examine it you have this top layer of silicone great and the clay on the bottom and Stella's flip it around yes so I'll take another piece of foam cord just cuz it's clean I'll flip this guy over okay pull that off and then carefully just kind of take the clay off I don't want to dislodge the lightsaber from the silicone mm-hmm I just want to take the clay off and the clay is still malleable it's it's still putty like it hasn't hardened yet and yes you're holding the prop down and then just tearing that off bit by bit I like the registration marks so Frank the thing we're mulling right now is fairly even though it's a two sided mold it's still fairly simple object cylindrical I imagine if someone sculpted something with more detail you know overhangs larger pieces would it still be the same process it's basically the same process you just have to determine where your parting line is gonna be mm-hmm but again that goes to how you want to cast it how the mold gets flipped over how the part comes out of it you know there's a lot of different kind of variables to that but you know for basics like just molding 101 doing a two-part this is a good way to start I've also seen a lot of people that instead of using this foam core I've seen em use Lego bricks okay to build their walls that way the walls are kind of the same size every time the only thing I don't like about that is a lot of times it'll leave like those little brick lines mm-hmm and I just like nice clean molds it's just a personal preference but those things work really well also if you want something that's reusable so you don't have to like waste foam core all the time got it I've also made mold walls out of like wood if I'm doing a larger mold the weight of the silicone could become a factor and you don't want it to like you know bend over the walls of the foam core so you could build the box out of wood also I mean basically there's a bazillion ways to do any of these things this is just like one version one kind of intro to how to do it and then you can look up all the different methods and figure out which one might be best for your project so right now you're scraping off this clay just like when you were preparing the other site for the silicone mold pour you want this to be real clean yeah not just on top of that prop but also on top of the bottom half okay break out that sponge mm-hmm once I get most of the big chunks of clay out I'll use a little bit of water and the sponge to rinse it all off alright that looks like a pretty clean mold the bottom there model is clean of course we use some Adams tools here it's a to blow off any of the excess residue but you can just patting it down with paper cleaning off a move yeah make it dry mm-hmm so next thing we want to do is put these walls back up and we'll just kind of reuse all this stuff okay so I'm pretty much just checking the corners to make sure that silicone isn't going to leak out between the walls just because these are kind of repurposed pieces of foam core mm-hmm they're a little crooked so I just want to make sure they're all sealed up all right so that's put back together and then we'll get it a little spray of crystal clear again the crystal clear is gonna put make a barrier on the silicone so the silicone doesn't stick to itself the guy you can also use spray releases and stuff so when you're casting when you need crystal clear every time you make a casts make sure the two sides don't stick no because the mold will be cured and be separate it's a good idea to have some mold release you you know the cast your piece in there the mold will last a little bit longer if you use a release nice that's a pretty perfect fit Frank yeah you didn't you did the math did the math well you've a little bit extra we're just saying earlier it might be good practice to you know maybe make up one sided mold if easy to pour something into if you have extra yeah work on two projects at the same time the other thing you can do is a lot of times I'll leave this rubber in the bottom of a bucket and you could pull it out and you can use it as like a bondo mixing pad or right things like that so this is still useful silicone again nothing sticks to it so it's almost like a flat surface you'd have work on em hmm when I was doing the evacuator you put the vacuum on mm-hmm and it rises up and it starts bubbling and then I had a like let some air in a little bit just because it would have overflowed the bucket so you let the air in just a little bit and then eventually it'll collapse in on itself and that's when you know that it's completely evacuated so it rises up and then it drops back down so when you mix up silicone or any kind of material and you want to put it in evacuator you always want to have a bucket that's at least twice the size twice the size of how much you have the volume things that you have in there well 30 minutes for this the set yep then we'll open it up and open up and cast something right we got a mold this is done Wow it's it's filled up so perfectly giant block of rubber shy block of two halves yeah so now we open it like Christmas D molding Christmas don't you want to help oh yes oh can i I was s permission oh it's those cookies Swedes tear apart this wall tear down this foam core wall foam core walls of oppression all right there we go two colors two halves I'm gonna just take a guess it's why you don't use Lego box yeah cuz if it's Lego blocks you get all kinds of lines there these are just all nice and smooth it's an aesthetic thing so then moms all cleaned up oh no two part you just separate it that's it I think it's like clear coat mm-hmm oh look at the registration there's some door thing light saber so yeah that's the two halves well that's great look at leas negatives Wow all right let's check the lightsaber this looks good see some of the clay here this will just was give this one I swept down with alcohol clean up the molds there so there we go now we have the two halves of the molds but we need to fill it somewhere if you notice I didn't put any registration right down the gray end is that littler that you're gonna pour it's never gonna cast yep we're gonna pour so I'm just gonna take this so I'm just gonna cut a little Channel okay doesn't give you that big right mm-hmm doesn't matter which side I'm gonna cut both sides both sides you want to kind of plan these molds beforehand this is a fairly simple straightforward thing so to put the pour spout down here where it's a flat place that you can just cut that off and stand it flat makes it really easy if you have a more complicated thing that has details on all ends you have to kind of pick and choose where you're going to put your porch pop as we talked about earlier you chose it here because the gravity will help and you'll be able to swirl whatever you cast inside to make sure you have no air bubbles so before we get to casting do we need to do any cleanup on the inside of the mold yeah it probably gonna wipe it down with a little bit of rubbing alcohol just to get any residue out of here like there might be a little bit of residue from the crystal clear mm-hmm or a little bit of residue from just little bits of clay that might still be right here somewhere if I was making more production mold I would spend a lot more time on that wall to make it perfect we're gonna have to clean up the piece when we pull it out yet but flashing yeah but that's just all about spending more time on the mold it spending more time on that wall so the better the better you get that wall that line between the first half of the second half and whether you made that clay the closer it is the prop the less work you put on yourself afterward you transmitted cleanup yeah of your cast so now we have molds it's time to cast something in them yep with so a silicone mold what can you cast what type of materials you can cast urethanes epoxies polyesters like all kinds of things if you're gonna cast silicone you have to use certain releases because silicone sticks to silicone and we need to release you mean like a spray or application yeah that coats each of the sides yeah and different releases work with different products you got to look at all the information and stuff like that if I was gonna cast silicone in here I would probably use like easily 300 or or just dish soap you can take dish soap and just work it up into a lather and that's usually good enough release you just want to create a barrier so what are we casting in here today well these molds are a little or floppy as silicone is so what we did is we cut some pieces of wood so when we put these together we'll strap it with wood and that'll keep it rigid and it'll keep it even pressure because I don't want to take a mold and I want to clamp it like here and here and here because then it'll pinch it so if you put it on a piece of wood it'll give it even pressure all the way around when you strap it together nice and looks like we have some resin over there yep just rubber band these together so we're talking about the proper care of a mold like this mold using silicone you said it lasts up to maybe like 50 times from Cassim if you treat it well if you treat it well you'd you know you've used resins that aren't gonna get super hot and burn out the mold mm-hmm this means a longer setting resin usually yeah these are platinum silicones so this one will probably last longer than like a tin based silicone so just you know things like that can help you make a mold last longer using spray releases you can use like these release 200 or a lot of other things just to help you know keep down the wear and tear on the molds about it so that's all strapped up I brought some resin this is smooth cast 45 d 45 is the barometer on a D scale which goes back to write all of our right so then we talked about this this here this is 20 T yeah and that's 20 on the t skin no no the T stands for translucent ah how's a scale is for soft things D scale is for rigid things and then there's a double O scale which is for gels real soft really soft okay so I'll mix up some resin not a hundred percent sure how much goes in there well eyeball it there's all kinds of ways that you can estimate how much resin to go in there you could put rice in there or sand or water or all kinds of things to ask me we're just gonna go for it okay highballing by volume so because it has all these ridges yeah I'm gonna pour in some and I'm gonna kind of roll it around which will kind of coat the inside of the mold you can kind of help it so that it hopefully doesn't trap as many air bubbles now we evacuated this residence we can also put in a pressure tank but Adam doesn't have a pressure tank here it's okay just a wait that'll wait and have you know maybe minor air bubbles and the resin give it a textured look if you're using a resin that's clear you can mix colors in it or we can just finish it later alright you've poured in the resin anything this resin you had a lot of five six minute work time yeah and then another 30 minutes of cure time yeah and you can get resins with different work times this just happened to be the one that I grabbed okay so let's come back in 30 minutes and then pop this open see the right sailor cool right now so descendants I'm excited I'm so excited like Christmas all over again oh let's break this mole open so a lot of rubber rants added I notice that you stacked more rubber bands at the bottom yeah cuz that's where whatever you're going to cast the same resin silicon gravity is gonna push that to the bone yeah you're gonna have a hydraulic pressure and so you're probably gonna want a couple more at the bottom and it's okay if you know the some stuff seeps out in very beginning first casting out of the mold you you have to learn some of the nuances of how the mold right so we might open this and we might go oh there's some air bubbles we need to do something different next classic could it could be empty ya never know Schrodinger I wasn't casting right now there we go that's pretty good you know maybe next time we'll add some pigment to the resin yep or try baby different material yeah urethane but this is that's a little warmth a little warm it's still not all the way done but this here is our resin lightsaber casting and let's get up close here because you can see like right here just some of that flashing tiny bit not and this can be cleaned up yes send it down sand it down take a file you know no problem there's a little bit of bubbles up there but again when we run the next one maybe when I put that last little bit in there I roll this end you can see I rolled all these and there's not really much of any air trapped up here which is where I was worried but I didn't roll this last little bit so right when I do that just roll the mold a little bit learn the nuances of every mold you're making but for a first casting I'd say that that's you know B plus B plus I would grade yourself what can you do to finish something like this kind of resin well I mean you'd want to sand it and maybe primer it and then you can paint it with just about whatever you want if we were gonna give it a finish like this we might want to send it to get vacuum analyzed or chromed mm-hmm you need a machine you Machine one hit make I make a lot of copies of copies because we can make a rubber one and that way you can hit people with it if only Luka knew it was so easy I'm thinking I'm returning the Jedi thank you so much Frank expressionist two-part mold now we have this mold so we can just experiment different materials different castings and thank you tested premium members for bringing this video series to test it well more how-to more projects in the future subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't yet and check that on testing comm racketboy dose website Franco calm topic calm I'm norm it's Frank Joey Sheen add special effects this right yeah give me a lightsaber well I'll give you I'll give you the sound effects you do the visual effects wall and we'll make it green make sure it's great with the clues you\n"