If you remember last time I started making some gap fills for the glass urn
which I will then place in the missing areas,
these fills would act both as support and aesthetical fills.
To make a mould for my plaster fills
I decided to use the two parts moulding and casting technique.
Firstly, I used a plasticine
to create a plasticine base for my plaster fill
and I also put some plasticine underneath my fill
to raise it slightly over the surface of the base.
Following this, I have this solder which I've cut into pieces
and this is going to create keying for my two-part mould.
This is an old example of a two-part mould
and as you can see they help the two part mould to lock into each other.
Also, you can see here two kind of bamboo sticks,
in order to create channels so that later on
I can put my epoxy resin through these channels into my mould to take a cast for my fills.
As you can see here I started building my wall along the kind of edges of my plasticine
base,
it's quite a simple process
you need fresh and soft plasticine to work on this
because otherwise, it gets really hard to mould the plasticine itself.
So now I will start making the one part of the two-part mould
in order to take the mould from the under side of my plaster fill.
I'm going to start measuring the moulding rubber and the catalyst
which will be about four hundred grams of silicone rubber to five drops of the catalyst
and catalyst actually helps fasten the setting process of the mould.
Now it's time to add around five drops of catalyst into it.
Once I put the silicone rubber mixture into the plasticine walls,
I'll leave it for about 24 hours, so until tomorrow afternoon
before I can actually remove the whole thing
and turn it around to start making the second part of the mould.
I have to prepare the epoxy resin about an hour before I start casting
the reason for this is because when I mix the two parts of the epoxy resin I have to
mix it really really well
and this causes a lot of air bubbles within the resin itself.
Even though the urn has a lot of bubbles within the glass
I still do not want an excessive amounts of air bubbles within my resin fill,
for this reason, I left it for an hour
and now it's time to pour it into my mould.
I prepared two plastic funnels by cutting plastic disposable pipettes
and I will place one of them here which I will pour the resin in
and the other one will go in here
so that I can also monitor when there's enough resin in the mould
so that the resin might start coming up,
that means that I have enough resin in my mould and I should stop pouring more.
So I put some resin into the funnel
and as you can see slowly slowly the resin is going down.
As you can see the mould is now full, it doesn't take anymore resin inside the mould
and I put my sign here saying that 'conservation in progress, please do not touch'
and I just put it here
so that everyone they should not be kind of touching
or trying to remove anything from this set up here
until the resin has set.