To Tell the Truth

    If you have a blog that you tell people how to do something, say make toy soldier molds, and by following your own directions, the project appears to be an utter failure, do you come clean and write of that failure?  That is the situation I found myself in earlier today.

  As I mentioned earlier, I had been producing 2 molds a day. On Friday I finished the molds for the selected figures, a total of 12 molds. This last week I had been getting out of bed 1/2 hour earlier than normal (at 4:00a.m. instead of 4:30a.m.) to pour the mold halves. It seemed well worth it to finish these molds.

What's more, on arriving home from work the much anticipated metal was in the mailbox. I quickly got the dog out for her walk, then settled in to start the casting.  As the metal melted I prepared the first 3 molds for casting.  The first casting didn't come out, as usual. However, as the afternoon wore on,only a couple of usable figures were produced. Even vents cut into the molds didn't improve the results.

 I called it quits after over an hour of failure. I went to sulk over this turn of events. I figured in the morning I would try again, using only 3 of the molds that looked best. Meanwhile, I enlarged the opening hoping that the increased metal would help.

Saturday morning was another dismal failure; this time a couple of figures, but not worth the effort. I ran everything through my head, why are these figures failing when I had reasonable success before? I did not want to think it is the rubber, as the new rubber is easier to use than the last couple of rubbers. I started thinking of different metal, so I googled the toy soldier companies that deal in molds and supplies. While doing so I came across a video by Prince August Co. " Proper venting of molds". After watching this video, I realized I had not vented the molds properly.  After venting the 3 molds I had tried that morning, I once again heated up the metal. In the first run, two out of three molds produced usable figures. By the end of an hour, I had a nice little stack of usable figures.

 Of course, one must understand the figures are usable to me for my wants; if one knows the detailing of Peter Laings, and then realize that there is less detail on my figures, it will become obvious that the is no money to be made from my production.  And as I mentioned in an earlier posting, if you are seriously thinking of making your own molds, there are websites with better information than this.