Before beginning on this assignment, I thought that it would take very little time. All I had to do was mold my finger and then pour the Smooth On hardening plastic into the mold, right? Although that is pretty much the entire process that I went through, it took me multiple tries to finally get a good finger. Whether it was getting the correct consistency for the alginate mix, getting the correct Smooth On mixture, or ensuring that I had no air bubbles in my finger, I kept learning how to mold and cast better after every iteration, which is what matters the most!

The first step in making this wall-hook-finger was making the mold out of the alginate under the ENGI 210 table. This is where the first struggle in my journey showed itself. At first, my alginate-water mix was too concentrated. When you do not add enough water for the amount of alginate that you have in your container, then when the alginate dries up, you have a bunch of lumps of alginate floating around, which then will show up on the casted finger. Next, my alginate solution was not concentrated enough. When you add too much water for the amount of alginate, 1) the alginate will take a really long time to dry up, 2) the mold will not be strong and it will deform once you pull your finger out of it.

Finally, after creating the optimal concentration in my alginate-water mix, I inserted my ring finger into the solution and waited around 5 minutes for it to dry. Afterwards, I pulled it out and began preparing the two-part Smooth On solution. I thoroughly enjoyed using this material as it was very entertaining watching it harden within a matter of seconds! Again, I ran into the problem where I did not create the best mixture of the constituents in a solution. I believe that I did not pour an exact 1:1 solution between the two parts of the solution, and what ended up happening was that my finger was too soft and flexible! I thought that this was very interesting and intriguing, but since I knew this assignment was to make a wall hook, I knew that this would not work well. Moving forward, I tried making the solution again by being more precise and waited around a  minute and a half for it to harden, afterward pulling the finger out.

The finger above is the iteration before my final prototype because it was not up to the standard that I wanted. As you can see, the mold did not completely surround my finger near the top, so a bunch of unwanted hardened plastic remained. I proceeded by repeating the above process and making a new finger mold and cast.

I had finally created a cast of the wall-hook-finger which I was proud of. The last step was post-processing my finger to get rid of the random air bubbles which formed in the alginate solution and also getting rid of the excess plastic which forms at the top of the mold after the solution hardens.

 

First I began the post-processing by using the belt grinder to get rid of the excess plastic on the base of my finger. This not only served to get rid of the excess material, but I could also modify the angle at which the finger would point out of the wall once it was mounted. After doing this, I sanded the surface of my finger in order to get rid of the spontaneous “air bubbles” which formed on the cast. Using 400 grit sandpaper, I gently rubbed the surface of my cast until all of them were gone and my finger was smooth. Finally, because I did not want to sand off the surface of the fingernail, I used an exacto knife to get rid of any imperfections around the nail. I found that using sandpaper around the fingernail is dangerous to the design. Because the fingernail is so thin, any amount of sanding would easily make the fingernail blend into the finger. Thus, I stuck to using a knife to remove the excess material from the nail.

I definitely learned a lot from this assignment. Besides learning which concentration of alginate solution works best for certain purposes, I also learned a few nice tricks and/or tips for molding. My very first piece of advice is to BE PATIENT. I struggled with this for my first few times molding my finger. After inserting my finger into the alginate, I would want to prematurely remove my finger or move it around, which would mess up the inside of the mold since it had not completely solidified. The second little tip which I discovered was that shaking the container or lightly hitting it on the top of a table helps the air bubbles escape the solution much more quickly! Lastly, the last tip I have is in regard to pouring the Smooth On solution into the mold. I recommend pouring a small amount of the solution into the mold first, and then rotating the mold and moving it around so that the solution is sure to cover the entire of the surface of the finger. Afterwards you can completely fill up the mold!