My “half” fingers | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

For this homework I chose the intermediate level, as I had not done any molding and casting before. My task was to mold and cast one of my finger twice (so that it was the same two times).

In order to do this, I first started working on creating the mold. I followed the instructions given and mixed 6.75 oz of water with 1.5 oz of alginate for around 4 minutes. Just after this I put my two pointer fingers (so that both casts looked the same) in the mold, and waited for around 5 minutes until I felt the mold dry.

Once this was done I took my fingers off carefully, taking care of not breaking the mold.

Then I started preparing the mixture for the cast, where once again I followed the instructions and used 10g of water and 35g of rockite. In this case I mixed until the mixture was homogeneous, and then poured it into the mold.

After this it was time for puting the screwes in the mold too, which was considerably hard, as I had to play with the supports to make them hold still.

Oncde I was happy with how my filled mold looked like, I let it dry for an entire day.

The next day I came back the fingers were already dry, and I carefully took them out from the mold. I realized that only half of my finger got casted, which was because I did not submerge my fingers deep enough when creating the mold. However, I also realized that this was the same size as some of my classmates’ full fingers, so I guess this just means that I have really big fingers.

Now it was time to post-process them. For this, I used first spray paint, I chose a silver color, as I really liked the features that my fingers had, and I believed that this color would highlight them. After spray painting them I let them dry for another day, and finally came back to clear coat them, so that the finish was as good as possible.