Key Our Cars

Mine wife got me a couple of Hirst Arts Molds (70/75/201 for the curious)  for Christmas and a fifty pound box of Merlin’s Magic dental plaster.  I finally this weekend got rid of my holiday house guests and had all my accouterments ready to try molding.  I built a ‘pound board’ out of a $6 bamboo cutting board from Wal-mart.  Some scrap pieces of 2×4′s on the bottom and some hd foam glued to those give me a bouncy surface for helping to get rid of bubbles.   I was going to try and vibrate it with a… novelty item but the vibrations aren’t strong enough.  For that purpose.  I may look at buying a small motor from some place like American Science and Plus, awesome place for odd ball items on the cheap although their selection isn’t nearly as crazy as it has been in years past.  10 years ago you could get a paper catalog from them with 100 pages in it of esoteric crap.  Anyway, small motor, mount an out balance collar to the shaft and voila, instant vibrations.

So yesterday I finally got set up, on our dining room table of all places, it’s just been brutally cold here so the garage was out and I didn’t want to use our gaming table and didn’t want to set up another table as a considerable portion of the house is still carpeted and I imagine plaster spilled on carpet is probably a bad idea so the dining room was confiscated.

I’m using Merlin’s Magic as the plaster, it was the most recommended in terms of being user friendly while still being crazy strong.  I mixed it up per the recommended settings on the HA site to-wit 30 grams of water by weight to 186 grams of plaster. Â  It mixed up pretty well over all.  It’s damn pricey though, mostly due to shipping costs and I’m going to try to find Hydrostone locally or within a reasonable drive which usually goes for $40 per 100lbs.  MM is $40 for 50 lbs and shipping doubles the cost or more.

I’d cleaned my molds and spritzed them with ‘wet water’ and now poured them, actually Laura and I both poured. Â  I poured multiple times and ended up with the scraping method being preferable right now.  I also scraped within a couple of minutes of pouring for best results after trial and error.  Waiting the recommended six minutes resulted in the plaster being too set to scrape easily.

I also tried the ‘glass’ method where you take a piece of glass (I used plexiglass) and lay it down on the molds starting at one edge to squeeze the excess plaster out.  Unfortunately I had issues with air bubbles and weighting and all that. Â  I tried it twice (6 molds altogether) and one or two came out good, the others had bubbles or I ended up with ‘tall’ parts because the glass wasn’t in full contact with the top of the mold in all locations.  The first time I used water bottles which had the advantage of letting me see what was going on but weren’t evenly weighted.  The second time I used bricks so I couldn’t see just how tight the glass was to the mold top.

I may try again with thick glass that would be flexless rather than plexiglass.  But the scraping is working for me as well.

Realistically I could make probably 3 runs an hour if I wanted to really push it and with my current set up time perhaps 4 maybe 5 molds at one time. Â  Of course a lot of this is sit and wait time so if you had a lot of molds you could certainly be busy all the time with weighing plaster and water, scraping, demolding the finished pieces etc.

So now I have 4 or 5 runs of my 3 molds from last night and will probably do several more especially of the standard flagstone wall pieces and the floor tiles.  I’m not sure how much of the rest I’ll need right now.

The express purpose of all this is to build modular layouts in full 3D for playing purposes much like this but at much reduced cost long term. Dwarven Forge stuff is extremely nice looking but just too pricey for a many (myself included).  Although if you only need a smallish setup then it’s probably more cost effective to go that route than buy your molds and plaster.  But nowhere near as fun. Â  As an example you could buy this set up from Dwarven Forge for $109+Shipping or you could buy two molds from Hirst Arts, a wall and a floor mold and a box of plaster for the same money and make about 5 times as many pieces.  And after you go through one box of plaster the next set of 5x the bits and pieces is half the cost because you already have your molds. Â  And you can create your bits and pieces at the height you want, example I’m going to have short walls so it’s easier to see things especially since the map section on my gaming table is high.

All in all the process was pretty simple, a few bits of trial and error as temperture of ambient, molds, water and the  color of plaster and the humidity all have an effect on your plaster and dictate the times needed to wait to scrape off the excess plaster and how long it takes to demold and I’d bet bubble severity.

So if you have some time to spare and the cash to outlay (spread it out among your players as well) and of course the interest then these molds and techniques might be something to consider to raise the bar at your table.