Friday, 30 January 2015

Polymorph moldable thermoplastic

Recently on the internets you may have seen a number of products that are moldable thermoplastics - materials that when heated [usually in warm water] you can then remold into any shape you wis. Recently I picked some up from the Aladdins cave of art shops in Manchester - Fred Aldous. This 100g bag was just £3.35


As you can see it all comes in pellets and what i was hoping to do was just make a quick cast of a dreadnought foot to go in my destroyed dreadnought crater. So here is the polymorph in it's raw form.


When dropped into hot water it all clumps together, although I fihed it out a bit quick - inexperience.


Mt Dreadnought foot in a plastic tub.


This is the Polymorph pushed on top, as you can see some granules had not melted enough to go transparent


From underneath.


I then dowsed it on cold water to set the plastic...


which was a mistake as this stuff sets rock hard and made it extremely difficult to remove the foot. Now Fed Aldous also do that Japanese Oyumaru molding plastic which probably would have been better for a push mold.


Eventually I got the foot out but I don't hold out much hope for this as a puch mold as extracting a milliput foot would be difficult as there is absolutely not flexibility in the Polymorph once set. Also the detail is patchy, I thinnk because the beeds hadn't all melted properly. I'm sure I'll find some more uses for this though, G.O.D. if they had this in a transparent version I'd have so much fun!


Anyway, it was worth a shot and I've still got loads more to play around with but just thought I'd share my experiment.

7 comments:

  1. Thats a really cool product Dave, cant think off the top of my head what I would use it for but I'm sure something will spring to mind, thanks for bringing this to my attention.

    Looking forward to seeing how it turns out, good luck:)

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  2. Hmm...were you using this to try and make a cast? Or to make base impressions? I'm always curious about new products!

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  3. Yeah, your using it for the wrong purpose. It's supposed to be used to make objects from, not the mold.

    To make a mold you need to use that Oyumaru stuff, AKA "Instant Mold". That's flexible enough to remove your object from.

    I've seen this stuff before in an Electrical trading store, but I'm not sure what I'd use it for.

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  4. The 'instant mold' is what I've used to make molds of gubbinz for ork details and it's brilliant. Troll trader on eBay sell it with free p&p and one pack can make several molds the size you need.

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  5. The 'instant mold' is what I've used to make molds of gubbinz for ork details and it's brilliant. Troll trader on eBay sell it with free p&p and one pack can make several molds the size you need.

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  6. You are right, you would need the beads to melt completely before you can capture the kind of detail you are after. You would need to coat the plastic piece with something to make it easier to remove as well. As the other guys have said though, this isn't the right product for that. You really need to be pouring this stuff into a mold you have already made. I use it to demonstrate thermoplastics in senior chemistry ;-)

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  7. Sounds like interesting stuff.

    However, as others have pointed out, I think this is the cast material, not the mold material. I would be very interested in seeing how well it holds up heating it and putting into a silicon or "instant mold' mold.

    Thanks for sharing, and I look forward to more experiments with this material.

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