Blog Post Finger Casting:
To begin with the blog post, I think casting is challenging. At the end of the blog post, I’ve made 3 fingers. One fail and two somewhat successes. Let’s begin with the project. The goal was to make a hanger with your finger. Without thinking much about the mechanics of the design, I curled my finger in the alginate solution and let it cure for about 30 minutes. This would later be a grace issue. After this, I poured the cast inside and let it cure for 4 hours.
The first finger. The first finger turned out pretty bad. The reason for this was that when I molded my finger, I didn’t realize that the tip of my finger was higher than the rest of the of the mold. This resulted in a finger that lacked part of the cast because there was an air bubble. This was really unfortunate, but I knew how to correct it moving forward. The mold was still in good shape so I decided to cast another finger.
The second finger. This finger still had a slight deterioration and air bubble in it. I made the finger better by tilting my mold in the curing process, so air could escape. This is a little sad, but I think the finger came out well enough to present and I’m really satisfied with how the screw stayed in the finger. Overall, I wanted to turn this up and I thought it was a really good job.
I had a complete failure that I will kind of disregard and not even talk about as the third finger. I didn’t wait long enough for the finger and when I pulled it out, it not only destroyed the finger, but it also destroyed the mold. This mold was no longer useful and at this point I only had one successful finger and one failed finger so I had to go back to the drawing board and mold my own finger. This time I decided that instead of a curled finger, I would go with a straight finger to not only show diversity in the molding process, but also to avoid the air bubble from the previous mold.
The final attempt. After letting the finger cure for four hours, I was done.
Once I had all the fingers, I quickly processed them, by scraping them with a popsicle stick, rounding out their shape. I also gave them a quick spray paint with silver (two coats) and then I finished the project.
Onto the cost. I have left the cost profile below. The cost is for allthree of the fingers came out to be about $170. This is a tremendous price for some little trivial fingers. I think I would pay $5 for each finger, so I would like to look at how to close the gap from about $50 from finger to $5. The first obvious answer is mass production, but I won’t take this cop out. Additionally, one could state that many more fingers and molds could be made from each of the supplies, this is also true but I won’t take this approach. I think the hardest approach is actually raising the desired price, from $5.Thus, I will take this route. I think the best way to do this is by create specialty fingers, maybe a local celebrity or mayor. Someone of that stature. This could create a little fun. Additionally, using these finger figures as a donation piece could be fun, ike donate $20 and get the persons finger mold who you donated to. Again, I think it is challenging to change the model. This said, $50 for a finger is still too much, hopefully a greater scale would reduce the cost, as many of our costs are for a larger project, like the subscription to a design kitchen, or the large amounts of materials.
