IAN HUNTER: This is actually a little better
because it pours a little nicer
than my mix,
but it's still thick enough
I think we're going to trial it out.
So put some gloves on there Luis.
Hey Bernie, why don't you mix up another batch.
That dirt you can dump out that we don't need.
And then you want to push on it
and pull like that so you reveal the windows,
and just push this right into the detail.
You can start just by moving it around,
and then once you got it pretty much in there
just push it down and reveal our window shapes.
So go ahead and take what we got,
and spread it into the rest of it right here.
Oh and what helps a lot too
is keep your blade wet.
You can either hit the area you're working on
or hit this.
Okay?
And you don't need to press all the way down.
You don't want to make depressions.
So first thing is, spread it on,
then bear down
and go diagonally even.
Just to reveal the windows.
All right, so go ahead and keep that
and keep the water around.
Keep it wet.
Plaster and water do mix
and plaster loves water
so we can keep it wet.
In the old days when they used to plaster houses
and not use drywall
a good plasterer could just use a broad knife and water
and actually polish the plaster out,
and never have to sand it.
That was a great way to do plasterwork
without having to do a lot of post work.
That's looking great.
So just keep it level.
We want to try to keep this plaster
at or just below the surface of the window.
Cool.
Just step over here and work on that side.
Now I know there's a lot of voids,
but we're going to continue mixing plaster
and adding it to fill those voids.
Oh that's a just hard plast - (mumbling)
- Yeah, you know, it's a little lump.
Let's take that out.
Okay, go ahead and fill it in.
This was a piece of plaster that got hard before hand,
and it lifted off,
so we don't want to have that.
So we're coming back and we've mixed another batch of
the plaster with the vermiculite.
We're filling in the rest of the mold.
Luis is going to add what's left here.
Again, you want to make this wet,
and then add the plaster to it.
Go ahead and scrape out whatever you have left
to go in these little voids.
We got our putty knife here.
How's that going?
Great.
Let's clean this edge off a little bit.
Okay.
A little more there.
Any more in there?
Oh we got a stick.
Yeah.
So go ahead and take that
and let's finish spreading that nice and flat.
I'm going to watch you while I drink this
lovely, refreshing Arnold Palmer.
Pete, if you could sing the National Anthem
while I'm drinking this
I think that would be pretty much
the show we need to put on.
I think you really need that.
So this is great.
We've put plaster in
then we've put in our,
oh sorry, we've put in our vermiculite and corn cob mix.
And we're going to trail off the top
and smooth this out the best we can.
Now the nice thing about plaster is while it's wet,
you can clean off a lot of the access.
When it dries because we put the vermiculite it
it's really soft.
So when we come back to this tomorrow
I'll show you how to clean off the back of this
with a sure form tool.
I think, should we risk it.
Oh, screw that.
We get the whole leveling table.
Grab the back end there.
All right, careful.
Like so, okay.
Okay, put it back down.
Don't worry about the level.
Pull these aside.
All right, I'm going to do something
a little dangerous here.
You'll know that we just literally
poured this during this lesson minutes ago,
but we were using 30 minute casting plaster,
so hopefully this is set up quite a bit.
Since it's still soft,
you'll notice it's a little lumpy on the back side.
I'm going to take this which is our sure form.
This is a, ah, made by Stanley.
They come in different sizes,
the one foot model with two handles on it.
You can also get a single hand one.
It's got a lot of excess plaster in it.
While we were off I scraped out that other mold,
so we could put the new plaster in.
So you just want to clean out that excess,
and take the sure form.
We're going to very gently go over the surface here
and scrape off all the excess.
It's just literally like a cheese grater,
will clean off all this excess plaster sticking up.
What we should be seeing
is the rubber mold sticking through.
Now we're seeing a little more window.
That's going to clean the back off.
Give us a smooth back.
The reason why you want that smooth back
is we're going to be adding this to one of our buildings
and we don't want a big void
between the face of the building and our casting.
So we want to smooth our casting out the best we can
to get those surfaces to meet.
You look anxious. (laughing)
What we want to do is
scrape until we start seeing the exposed rubber.
The nice thing about the rubber is
that the rubber doesn't get scraped by this.
Only the plaster, the hard plaster will get scraped,
but the rubber will stay there.
So if you want to just gently go over the surface,
and get to where we expose the window.
A little harder.
Hey Linds,
will you get me another sure form?
Sure form
It's in the tool room.
They're marked with it says sculpting tools.
You go to the very back of the room,
plastic bins say sculpting tools.
So we're going to get a second one of these,
but you can see Luis has already exposed all these windows.
He's already smoothed out the back considerably.
This step is going to save us a lot of time
when we build the real building
or put this on the building because
we'll have a smooth surface.
Now to be fair,
for our break away buildings this is going to be the wall.
We won't be gluing it to anything else.
It's going to be free standing,
but this is important to show how we can clean this up.
I'm doing this when it's green.
Another words, the plaster's still soft
so it's easy to use the sure form.
If I were to wait til tomorrow morning
the plaster would be really hard,
and that would make it much more difficult.
That's actually cleaning up pretty nicely.
The reason also is able to come off easily
is because the vermiculite and corn cob in there,
there's really not much plaster left.
We really just got this grape nuts like material
that we're scraping off.
The plaster's just holding it together
just barely.
Which is what we want.
We only want the plaster to hold this together enough
so we can get it out of the mold, stand it up,
glue it together, paint it,
and then when we're all proud of our work
we can have someone smash it.
This is working out really well.
So know we've got this exposed set of windows.
We don't' have to do a lot of clean up.
We're see thing edge of our part,
which is the rubber coming through.
Look at that.
It's going to be beautiful.