While we were working on molding and casting our chess pieces, we did a side project on additional molding and casting techniques. Using Alginate we made a mold of our hand in a medium container, and then mixed some quick dry concrete, pouring it into the mold to make the cast. This process seemingly is very simple, but unfortunately it did not work as planned.

My first two attempts were to mold and cast two fingers on my right hand. I created the alginate mold and then poured the concrete and left them overnight. They seemed promising, but while trying to remove the alginate both casts broke in half.

(my first two attempted fingers)

After these two first failures, I discussed the situation with Dr. Wettergreen and Adulfo and we decided that this new brand of Alginate might be causing the concrete to not fully set. So we decided to try two different solutions. First I made another alginate mold and left it to set for 6 hours, and then poured the concrete. The second one I made a new mold and poured the concrete almost immediately. We also thought that potentially the duration of the set time we were giving the concrete was too long. This was definitely a possibility so we decided to try and pull both casts out after 30 minutes (the concrete was supposed to set in 20 min). Here are the unfortunate results of this experiement:

 

 

(none of the attempted castings were successfully removed from the alginate)

After this additional failure, Dr. Wettergreen decided to cancel the assignment, attributing the failure to the change in materials between semesters, or to the age of the alginate that we were using.

Cost-

My time @$15/hr x 3 hours =$45

Concrete 1 bucket @$13= $13

Alginate 1 bag @$35= $35

total=$93