Fingers. Yay.

This week, I managed to make a beautiful casting of my right thumb, another that was not too bad, as well as 6 abominations. I’ve also decided that every decoration in my future home will be cast from one of my body parts (leg lamps, finger coat hangers, my table is just gonna be me touching my toes).

In all seriousness though, this week was a doozy.

I started out with mixing two (2) ounces of alginate (by weight) to 8 ounces of water (by volume) to make my mold. I found that this amount was perfect for the Solo cups seen in the picture below.

Actually, before mixing the alginate and water, I waxed up my right thumb so that it would release from the mold more easily. Once I measured out the alginate and water, I went out back with my supplies and the drill with our makeshift mixing bit. I had the water in a Solo cup, and I added one third of the alginate at a time, mixing in between with the drill. Once all of the alginate had been added, and the mixture was smooth and pink, I set the cup on the table and inserted my waxy thumb. I sat there looking like a fool with my hand in a cup for about 7-9 minutes, mostly because I wanted to make sure that all of the alginate finished solidifying before removing my thumb. After I removed my thumb, I had my first mold (Yippeeee).

Next, I mixed up the EasyFlo in a 1:1 ratio, and poured it into my mold. I then held a wood screw upside down in the thumb and waited for the EasyFlo to cure. However, I accidentally removed my first cast prematurely, so I did not get a fully detailed thumb.

So, I tried it again. This time, I also used one of the orbital sanders to try and remove bubbles from the EasyFlo. To do this, I put the sander’s back against the cup after pouring in the EasyFlo.

Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to make that much of a difference in the quality of the cast. My next attempt at improving the quality was to dry out the inside of the alginate, which had filled with a little bit of water. To do this, I got a paper towel and curled it up so that it fit in the hole. However, when I wiped out the hole, I ended up tearing up the sides of the hole, meaning that my cast would definitely not have the definition that I desired. I casted another finger anyways, and found that it was of poor quality. So, I made a new mold, using the same methods as before. With this new mold, I made a couple of attempts at doing a regular cast again, simply pouring easy flow into the mold and shaking it slightly with my hand to help it get into the details of the mold. Additionally, before each of these, I made sure to dump out the water in the mold, not wipe it out.

At one point, I tried to use the vacuum pump while a cast was curing in an attempt to reduce air bubbles and improve cast quality.

However, this seemed to make the quality worse, and I believe that this was due to the vacuum pulling out the water from the alginate, affected the EasyFlo and making the cast uglier.

Finally, I made one more attempt at a regular cast, and that one actually came out the best!

So, after this cast, I selected the next best thumb in my previous attempts to be used as my final product. Once I had both selected, I cut and sanded the bases of the thumbs, near the screws, so that they were smoother and looked nicer. Now I had my final thumb hangers!

In this assignment I learned a lot about what can impact the success of a cast, and what can makes things worse. In the end, I think the simple, no-strings-attached cast was the best way to go.