casting grt tanks part one!

This is a fun test to see if I can cast FW grt tanks, I have purchased two sets of tanks which is about 8 tanks and they are pretty expensive, I want to create about 16 more tanks for an armageddon formation that would be fun to create, but that is super expensive and I want to create more variations, so I will be casting bits a peices to create the rest of the tanks, I think I have bleed enough to FW, so this will try to see what works and what the cost difference is!

First to creat the molds, For this I am using Silicone RTV (partA and partB) and picked these up from Kit Kraft in Studio city, a bit pricy (24.99 + 10.00)? for creating the molds, here is a picture of the bottles:


This first test for this is to create a mould for a set of tank tracks converted over from an ork trakked buggy thing, these are plastic and look easy to create, also creating a mold for the lower part of a fw resin grt tank body. I used some old legos to create the structure for the mold, and connected a screw to the piece so it could be lowered into the silicone and held suspended in there. To mix the parts A (silicone) and parts B (activator), its a ration of 1 part B to 10 parts A and this is by weight, so I poured them into a mixing pot on a scale to get it right. Mix it to get a consistant blue color and you have about an hour to pour it, here are the pictures of the parts and pouring for the first set of molds!

After waiting 24 hours or so, I was able to pull out the legos (the silicone did not stick to it) and then pull out the plasic and resin parts out the the mould, it was very flexible and seemed to keep a lot of detail, the only real problem I ran into was tiny bublles at the bottom, but not sure how to fix this, and I have filler putty that will make sort work of it, then I created more molds of tank bodies and turrets!

The next step will be to create the cast, using the casting urethane parts A and B, mixed 1 to 1 ratio, here is an image for the casting urethane that I picked up at kit kraft. Tomorrow I will try to do the first casts, the second round of molds are still drying!