[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] In this video we're going to show you
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] a quick and easy way
to make a mold and cast of your own hand.
It's fairly versatile and the position of your hand
and what you do with the casting are entirely up to you.
[Music]
Molding and casting is actually something I've done quite a bit of,
and I wanted to show you one of the very easiest ways to do it yourself.
There are two main ingredients.
A mold compound and a casting compound.
I got both of these at a local craft and fabric store,
but there are many options using the same basic idea.
Our mold material is something called alginate,
and our casting material is plaster with some other added elements to it.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll quickly make a box using foam core and a glue gun.
We'll mix up some alginate molding material and mold our hand inside.
Once the mold is cured, we'll whip up a batch of our plaster,
and pour it into the mold, making a perfect cast of our hand.
This box will have a bottom and four sides to it,
and of course, no lid because my hand needs to be able to fit down inside.
So I'm going to start making some marks on this piece of foam core
that are just big enough for my hand in the thumbs up position to fit inside.
This piece right here will be the base,
so now we need to measure out the four pieces that will act as the walls.
I want to leave a little bit of a gap at the bottom
so my hand isn't pressed down onto it.
So, let's lift that up.
I probably want to get molded up to right about here on my wrist.
Not far beyond the edge of my hand but a little bit.
Overall, it looks like we want to pour the alginate about six inches up,
and let's give ourselves an extra inch of wall just so we're not overflowing it.
[Music]
We've got all five pieces of our board measured out,
now let's cut them down.
We'll probably also need to trim the two narrower sides as well.
Just so everything fits together nicely.
[Music]
All right we now have this beautiful little white paper box,
and this should do a perfect job of holding our alginate.
This alginate mold material has a couple of advantages and disadvantages
over mold materials we've used in the past.
You've probably seen some of our videos where we used silicone
to make molds of things,
and silicon is great for a lot of uses.
It's very durable.
It lasts a long time.
You can get several casts out of one mold,
but it does have some drawbacks.
Silicone is fairly expensive and even the quickest stuff
can take up to 45 minutes to cure.
Alginate cures in about two to five minutes at most,
and while that seems really good, it does have its own drawbacks.
Alginate isn't very durable.
You're likely to get one or maybe two castings out of a single mold.
It's also a very wet material while you're using it as a mold,
so there are some things you can't cast in it.
A lot of types of resin won't work well if they're surrounded by moisture.
However, it is perfect if you're trying to cast something made of plaster
and because it cures so much faster.
It's a lot more comfortable to try and cast say a hand in this
than it would be in silicone.
Because otherwise, I'd have to put my hand in the box,
and just hold it perfectly still for like 45 minutes before I pulled it out.
And then, I would have a really hard time getting my hand out of there.
Silicone grips quite a bit,
whereas the alginate is a lot more slippery,
so I should be able to just slide my hand right out of the mold once it's done.
To get a good sense of how much alginate mixture we're going to need,
Let's first fill up our box with sand, and then pour that into our bowl.
That'll show us about the level we're expecting to get to.
I am also adding my hand into the box to get an accurate measure of the volume.
[Music]
All right, I think that is just about exactly where we want our alginate to go to
that's covering up the end of my wrist.
Let's see if I can pull my hand out.
[Music]
With the particular alginate that I'm using,
it has a ratio of 0.83 cups of alginate to 1 cup of water,
which is 1/2 a cup plus 1/3 of a cup to 1 cup of water.
If you're using a different brand of alginate,
it may have a different ratio.
Make sure you follow the instructions that come with your packaging.
All right.
Going for a thumbs up.
Pushing my hand down into the alginate.
[Music]
All the way the bottom and then back it off just a little bit.
Cause I don't want it touching the bottom, just close.
Make sure if you're molding your hand,
you're in a position that you can stay in for a few minutes
because although it does cure faster than silicone,
it's not instantaneous.
I can feel it curing around my hand,
and for the most part, it doesn't feel wildly different,
except that just as my hand moves the tiny tiny bit,
I now feel resistance.
where it used to just move right through the liquid.
I think I'm about ready to take my hand out,
and the alginate does really get into all the very tiny details
so it feels like it's stuck to the sides of our hand.
It's not really chemically bonded on there,
it's just gotten into every tiny little groove, and nook, and cranny in your hand
that its gripping on pretty well.
So in my experience, the easiest way to get it off
is to really just start wiggling your hand around inside the mold just a little bit,
and you'll feel it start to detach from your skin everywhere.
Once it feels like it's loosened up,
You should be able to just slide your hand right out.
[Music]
Here we go.
Hand slid out pretty nicely.
You can see down in there the cavity,
that hand-shaped cavity somewhat.
Our alginate mold seems like it's working great,
My hand came out of there without destroying too much.
I can see the mold on the inside.
So I think this is gonna work really well.
So what we need to do now is mix up a batch of our casting material.
We want to be ready to do this immediately after finishing the mold
because an alginate mold does not keep very long.
If you want to expand its lifetime by a little bit,
you can keep it in a sealed container with a lot of wet paper towels
that can help it stay viable for even a couple days
but it is something that's going to degrade quickly.
So this is really something you want to make the mold,
and then cast into it right away.
Our casting material says that it is a 3 to 1 ratio of the material to water.
So let's mix them up about enough to fill up a hand giving a thumbs up,
and then pour that into our mold.
[Music]
The plaster is now nice and evenly mixed together.
It's definitely a thicker substance than water,
but it's thinner than say honey.
Like watered-down Elmer's Glue maybe?
Now, I'm just going to tap and shake this bowl for a couple minutes
trying to get some of the extra air bubbles out of the plaster.
[Music]
I think we're now ready to pour our plaster down into the alginate.
Let's hope I mixed up enough.
If I didn't however, while the plaster is still liquid,
I'll be able to mix up another smaller batch and add that to it.
[Music]
Before I fill that all the way,
I'm going to take the mold just shake that a little bit.
Again, I'm just trying to get any air bubbles out,
gonna tip it to make sure that the thumb
full all the way,
and all of the air bubbles are out of that.
[Music]
Look at that.
I have maybe a couple of tablespoons leftover plaster.
So if your hands happen to be the exact right size of mine,
then three cups of this casting material and 1 cup of water is the perfect amount.
My hand is molded and the cast that has now been poured into the mold,
and that needs to cure.
With this stuff, it takes about 45 minutes before it's ready to take out of the mold.
So let's set this aside for 45 minutes, and while it's going,
I think I'm actually just going to whip up a whole second box,
second batch of alginate and make a second mold
so I can make sure I can get two of these thumbs-up castings.
[Music]
I've got a second mold made and we're about ready to start making the plaster.
But before we do, there's some other things I want to try.
This version of the hand,
I'm hoping we can turn into a wall decoration,
something that actually just attaches to the wall with some threads.
So, here I have a threaded hook,
and we're going to try embedding this in the plaster as it cures,
and I also have this spare piece of steel rod and
we're going to try and bend that to a shape so it fits nicely into the thumb.
[Music]
I'm going to fit this wire down inside the mold,
right down into the end of the thumb.
So that this angled portion should be in the body of the hand so it's nice and stable,
and then after I pour the plaster in, I'll take this hook and lower that in as well.
So hopefully, we'll have the hook embedded in it
that lets us have threads so we can screw this into a wall after its cured,
and a piece of metal inside the thumb really giving that some good reinforcement.
[Music]
The plaster does take a little while to start setting up ,
so I think to get the hook to be in the right spot,
I'll try attaching a little bridge of tape going across,
and just lower that down into the plaster.
our first mold with the casting in it has now been sitting for 45 minutes curing,
and I think it's time we try and take it out of box.
Now, I don't have a good way to grab onto this.
So I think what I'm going to try and do to get it out is cut the sides of the box off,
and then destroying as little as possible
but I'm just going to pull apart the alginate to get to the casting inside.
Yep. This is just getting destroyed.
That's okay.
That's what we use an alginate mold for.
[Music]
Our first casting is now out of the mold,
and I gotta say I am pretty happy with how this thing turned out.
Pretty similar?
[Music]
So this turned out really well.
As you can see, the mold did not survive.
Not even a little bit.
I had to just tear it into several large pieces to be able to get the casting out.
But that is what we are expecting.
That's what happened with alginate.
The point of alginate is you get one good casting,
and then if you need several,
you can actually make a stronger silicone mold off of this hand.
There were a couple of spots where it came out with some errors.
You can see here.
This right here was an air bubble.
When the plaster flowed down in,
it couldn't quite get rid of that right there,
and even though I tipped it,
mostly I tipped in this direction, and that air bubble stayed stuck in there.
So if I need too I could fix that up with a little bit of spackle
before I do any decorations, or just put this hand on display.
Once you're done with your mold,
and you've already take the casting out of it and it gets destroyed,
you can just throw it away.
If you need a second casting,
you can either make a different mold off of the casting you made,
or you can make a second mold the way we did.
I think it's time to demold the second hand,
and since the first one was in there so tight,
I'm just going to go straight to destroying the box and the mold to get it out.
[Music]
Now there were two pieces of metal that we embedded into this hand.
One of course is the hook at the back,
which is going to give us a threads
to hopefully let us mount this onto a wall.
The second is a bent piece of metal that I ran through the thumb,
and you can actually see it sticking out a little bit from the tip of the thumb.
That most likely means that the way the metal was resting,
it pressed just slightly into the alginate mold.
We're going to try and clean that up just by going over it with a file.
[Music]
Look at that.
Two separate castings of my hand giving a thumbs up.
[Music]
Let's see if we can't hang this one on the wall,
and make a wall-mounted thumbs up.
[Music]
For the hand that isn't getting mounted on the wall,
this is just going to be a desktop accessory.
I want this to be a little more decorative,
so I'm going to paint it a hammered metallic paint,
and see how that looks.
But first, I do want to try and fill in these little gaps that formed with the bubbles.
There are several ways I can try and do that.
I'm going to see how well it works to use super glue and baking soda.
[Music]
Now that we've done a little bit of cleanup and patchwork,
let's add some paint.
[Music]
I've got one hand as a desk decoration,
and one that can be mounted onto a wall as a hook or as just a wall decoration.
Either way there's lots of options of what you can do with this,
and of course, you don't have to use these same techniques
just to mold and cast your hand.
The alginate is fairly versatile,
and anything that you think you can slip out of the mold,
you should be able to cast pretty well.
Of course, you don't have to make a thumbs up if you're trying this.
You can do any position you want.
Jjust be aware that some hand positions
will have a tendency to get air bubbles trapped inside them
so you'll really need to make sure that you rotate things around
to get all of those air bubbles out.
It's a fun project that doesn't take too long and doesn't cost too much.
I'd give it four thumbs up.
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