At Arisia 2015, Jimmie P. Rodgers (@jprodgers) and I hosted a teasecraft meetup and gave a presentation entitled “Fun with Silicone!” We covered some basics of casting and moldmaking specific to working with body-safe silicone, and we also touched on body casting and some advanced casting techniques.
Update, 7/20/16: At long last, here’s the video of the session!
Here are the notes from our talk (presented as a slide deck):
Pingback: Resource List: teasecraft at FFF #44 (Feb 2015) | The Toymaker Project
I know it is going to sound insane, but I have yet to see plaster inhibit any smooth-on platinum silicone. I couldn’t believe it at first but early in my time making silicone toys, I was testing various materials that might contact platinum silicone for inhibition. I used a slab of ‘ArtPlaster’ plaster as a positive control. It’s calcium sulfate and sulfur inhibits platinum silicones… so obviously it would inhibit. I’d even kept clay that touched plaster separate from clay touching silicone.
But the silicone touching plaster cured just fine. It wasn’t even slowed down. I did the experiment again with tin silicone as a positive control and it inhibited Pt silicone just fine, as I had previously observed. While the stuff on plaster cured great. For best results I needed to seal the plaster, but I’ve never had a problem with cure failure from plaster. Lots of other reasons not to use it, shrinkage, long time to dry, fragility, brittleness. But its totally comparable with at least smooth-on platinum silicones.
Still, if I was going to use a rigid mold, I’d go with polyurethane resin. It also doesn’t inhibit silicone curing and it’s much tougher than plaster. Main place I had used plaster was for casting in alginate and I do that with molten clay now thanks to information here!
Huh! I wonder if the problems I had were due to casting in the plaster before it was completely dry? I know at least one other person who’s used plaster without any problems, so I’m betting that was my issue. Thanks for sharing this info! I might actually have to give plaster another try sometime.
Pingback: Resource List: Sex Geek and Kinky Crafter Meetup on JoCo Cruise 2016 | The Toymaker Project