For this project, even though I had never done molding and casting before, I wanted to try to be as efficient as possible with my materials, so I decided to try making two fingers at once. First, I poured an alginate mixture into a cup and put my first two fingers in the mixture, making sure that the fingers didn’t touch each other or the edge of the cup. Once the alginate had sufficiently dried, I pulled my hand out, mixed the plaster, and poured it into each finger slot. Then, I added screws and used the tape setup below to hold them in place while the plaster set.

As you can see in the image above, as the plaster dried, it separated, and there was a layer of water on top. One concern I have is that because the fingers are a little shorter than I thought they would be, the screws do not go very deep into the plaster, and one of them is a little loose.

 

Here is what it looked like just before I removed the plaster from the mold:

I used an exacto knife to cut the alginate and extract the fingers. They came out a little dusty (shown below) so I used a brush to clean them off.

Then, I decided to paint them. I used the spray paint from the loading dock–– I did one finger in blue and one in bronze, and then added a clear coat to finish.

Cost:

• Alginate: $35 per 3 lbs (from workbook)
• Plaster: $17 per 25 lbs (from workbook)
• Screws: ~$6 per 50 screws (ex: from McMaster)
• Spray Paint: $15 ($5/can; 3 colors from Rust-Oleum)
• Labor: $16.5 (1.5 hours for setup and post-processing; assumes lab assistant rate of $11/hour)

Total: $89.5