Today I turned my fingers into hooks in order to practice basic molding and casting methods.

I started off by mixing alginate and water at a 1:4 ratio in order to create the mold. After this was well mixed, I stuck my index finger into the liquid alginate and held my finger still within the mixture for a period of 8 minutes as seen in the image below.

I then took my finger out of the mold which left behind a finger-shaped cavity in the solidified alginate. I then created a mixture of liquid plaster to pour into the mold. We did this by combining a 2:1 ratio of plaster powder to water. We poured the plaster into the negative of my index finger and dangled a screw into the plaster mixture using tape. We left the molds sitting outside for 45 minutes in order to let the plaster mixture solidify.

After the 45 minutes had passed, we began to tear away the mold from the hardened plaster finger.

This resulted in a singular plaster finger positive. We repeated this process to produce 3 more fingers (two for each person in our team) which resulted in a total of 4 index finger positives.

We spray painted the fingers blue to represent the frostbite we were feeling as it was very cold outside and we were letting our fingers sit in cold liquid for long periods of time.

We applied a clear coat finish and let our fingers out to dry. What resulted was 4 very shiny blue fingers that can now be used as hooks.

 

Cost Breakdown:

alginate powder: $9

Plaster powder: $10

4 screws: $0.75

Blue Spray Paint: $7

Clear Coat: $7

4 hours of work: $60

TOTAL COST:  $93.75