Monday, March 9, 2015

Casting With Metal Powder

Will Morgan at WM Armory brings us a detailed tutorial on using metal powders for resin castings



1 comment:

Alysson Rowan said...

An excellent tutorial - and I have to agree about the use of at least a good quality dust mask when using fine powdered metals.

As a long-term use of metals in cold-casting, I have come to prefer using sintered bronze for metal casting, at least for props that will come in for a lot of handling (jewellery, especially). These are much coarser powders that can be used to back the fine finishing powder that the mould is dusted with - or even alone.

A word of caution, should you use this method, the end result with a fully-loaded resin will be electrically conductive, so electronic effects need to be properly insulated.

Using the bulk filler method means that you can add colour to the resin as well as the metal filler - allowing some rather fancy, exotic metals to be simulated (especially when combined with the white bronze filler).

An important tip is to "plate" the mould with the loaded resin (which has a buttery texture), and to then fill the hollow with a glass powder or fibre loaded resin for strength.

With care, it is possible to produce features in different colour metals for those fancy effects.