Jump to content

Working with molds and resin tips? (painting tips too)


Toa Kazoreem

Recommended Posts

Hello everyone!  ^_^

 

I will try in this forum with these question, because I know someone here can know something of this.

I searching in various posts some tips of work with resin, but the information sometimes is something diffuse, are here my questions:

 

What resin have similarity in the results to the lego plastic in quality? 

I read too the quality of the mold material is important too, what type of material can be used for make a mold for a kanohi?

 

And a little question about painting

 

Exists a technique and/or type of paint for painting the balljoints where the paint will not get out of the piece because the friction?

 

Regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would take this with a grain of salt since I haven't actually done any molding myself, but from what I know resin will not be as high quality as LEGO plastics, and will be a bit more flexible. Most molds I've seen are made out of silicone. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to replicate LEGO quality material since they use high pressure injection molds, which are fairly pricy.

 

As for the painting question, I do have experience with that. Short answer: no. There are some paints that are fairly durable, but regularly moving the joints (and especially with the added friction since the paint will make the ball slightly larger) will wear the paint off with time. The only thing I can think of that would definitely last on a ball joint would be dyes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A while ago I was interested in making my own masks and pieces, and although I didn't try I did gather some information.

First of all: silicone can be rather expensive. Second, you can use a mold for a limited number of times before having to make a new one.

Softer silicones will allow you to make more detailed casts, but the molds will wear out faster.

You might want to check out this Brickshelf gallery, you can see some custom-made masks and read a tutorial in the "How-to" folder.

 

There's also a couple of topics on BZP here and here (in the second one you can see the results of a mask made using resin).

You might send a PM to SixFootBlue to ask him what resin and what silicone he used.

 

As for the paint, I doubt you can find a paint that will not wear off on a ball joint, but there's an interesting topic on Eurobricks about using vinyl dye to repaint lego pieces. It's applayed through the use of a spray can just like spray paint, but it should be more durable. Note that I've never tried myself neither paint nor dye.
If I recall correctly paint should be more durable on resin than on original LEGO pieces, but I might be wrong.

 

Using actual dye would be more difficult but it would give you permanent results. The inconvenience is that you can only make pieces darker. I wouldn't suggest this solution since getting the right shade of color is hard.
This tutorial, although it might get weird at times, explains how the process of dyeing pieces work. I suggest you jump at 11:00 to see how it works.

 

Some people tried to melt original LEGO pieces using acetone, and use them to make their own casts. The results were kinda bad.

 

Last but not least, there was a very interesting tutorial about making your own molds on classic-calste.com, but unfortunately the images are no longer working. It's a shame because I recall it seemed to be pretty good. I think I saved it on my pc, I'll post a link here if I find it.

EDIT: Here it is, it's a .rar containing the webpage.

Edited by Hidron Nuva

hidron_nuva_idea.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...