Jewelry makers frequently use rubber as a mold making medium. Learn how to work with this material and how to evaluate different types of rubber.
14K Pink Casting Grain – made with recycled gold
These slow, quiet days of summer are always a good time to review your shop practices before the busy holiday season kicks into high gear. To help you prepare to successfully cast all of the pieces you hope will be…
Everybody scampers for executing orders in a rush against all odds to satisfy customers or – if you’#39;re lucky – to make customers smile with a piece you’#39;ve created with your craft.
But how about yourself? Why not take the time, unwind and focus on a gift for yourself. Besides all recent technical advances of CAD/CAM there’#39;s still the most sophisticated things in nature. So why not take put an orchid on your bench literally.
Recently this custom ring design came to my bench with the request that it be made in platinum and a rubber mold be created in case our store ever wanted to make a second ring. The new ring was to be made for…
In my first article I made a rubber “sandwich” mold of this basket style mounting. The focus of this article is how to cut the rubber mold so that I can get clean wax injections that require a minimal amount…
The company Alkiviadis C. Efthimiou is active in the jewelry industry since 1987. Over the past 15 years we became the experts of manufacturing the mold of your prototypes in various types of silicons, so you can produce wax models…
Cuttlefish casting is a quick and fairly accurate casting method. Its applications are limited only by the thickness and overall dimensions of the shell. It is difficult to achieve fine details on the surface of the casting, but this is offset by the richly complex texture that is a natural by-product of this method.
Welcometo Stacey Rhodes Jewelry Designs, where we will detail all of the steps involved in adding a new piece ofjewelry to our line. In this issue we will be working with our latest design. I’ll take you through every phase…
Welcome to Stacey Rhodes Jewelry Designs, where we will detail all of the steps involved in adding a new piece of jewelry to our line. In this issue we will be working with our latest design. I’ll take you through…
Jewelers need to make molds of objects and parts frequently. Usually wax is poured into the molds and the results used for casting. There are all sorts of vulcanized rubber molds, silicone molds and others which are intended for specific…
Tools for making natural rubber molds.
Natural rubber or silicone rubber? In the world of lost wax casting, this question is hardly an academic one. The mold material chosen must be up to the task of turning a single original model into hundreds or even thousands of wax models for casting, and choosing the wrong material can lead to some serious hair-pulling in the casting department. There are actually three primary categories of rubber mold making materials.
Accurately laying out an oval or marquis stone in wax can be tricky business. We learned this foolproof method for getting a perfect layout every time after years of difficulty.
There are two brands of metal clay available today; Precious Metal Clay and Art Clay Silver. There are a lot of similarities between the two, and some differences. My experience is with Precious Metal Clay (PMC), so the techniques and methods that I write about will be from this vantage point.
R&R Plasticast investment provides casters using plastic and wax/ plastic pattern materials with a mold material that meets the high expansion demands of the pattern material while maintaining mold surface and dimensional integrity.
Ultra-Vest Investment offers casters smooth mixing controlled setting clean breakout and excellent surface finish. Ultra-Vest eliminates the watermarking defects seen with many other investments. Ultra-Vest offers superior performance and unmatched consistency. For low temperature mold materials. Rapid prototype cooling.
Mold cutting Akron RTV-RP clear silicone. Cylinder mold was cured in a round film canister which saves about 1/2 the normal amount of silicone. RP master was designed by Diannah Beauregard in western North Carolina. RP master was built at…
n this installment we present a mold cutting technique called a spiral cut, which is designed to facilitate the successful release of a cage-like wax model from a mold.
The new Romanoff LMR is a clear silicone RTV (room temperature vulcanizing) liquid mold rubber compound with a platinum-containing catalyst, which makes it ideal for use by jewelry manufacturers. Curing can be heat-accelerated, but the compound does not require heat to cure, so it is ideal for delicate wax models and intricate resin patterns produced by rapid prototype (RP) systems.
Invented by Victor Joyner, a Chicagobased manufacturing jeweler, patented High Definition (HD) Patterns are made of a light-curing polymer material that can he injected into a silicone mold with very low pressure at room temperature. After hearing about the exceptional detail achieved by these patterns, and the subsequent clean burnout, I decided to put the material to the test in my shop.
Mold cutting sounds simple enough: Using a sharp knife and a simple tool, such as a can opener or a pair of vise grips, the mold maker separates a rubber mold into two halves, allowing the model and subsequent waxes to be removed. But like so many seemingly simple tasks, there are intricacies to cutting a successful mold that go well beyond cutting the block of rubber into two parts. In addition to ensuring that delicate waxes can be removed without distortion, the mold cutter must cut the mold in such a way that the two halves will match up perfectly time after time, and the injected wax will fill well and require minimal cleanup.
Jewelers are always molding objects and parts, most often to use for making wax models for casting. There are many vulcanized rubber and silicone mold materials intended for this purpose in the jewelry industry, but what if you need to…
Jewelers are always molding objects and parts, most often to use for making wax models for casting. There are many vulcanized rubber and silicone mold materials intended for this purpose in the jewelry industry, but what if you need to make a mold outside of your well-stocked studio? Here are two non-traditional mold-making materials borrowed from the dental field that will work in a pinch.
Flat cut silicone mold using Castaldo VLT rubber.
Recently a customer requested that we make her an unusual mother’s ring. She chose a magnificent 3.56 ct. oval blue sapphire as her center stone and this design was made for her ring. The two bezel set side stones, one…
William Underhill came to bronze pots just as his teacher at the University of California at Berkeley Peter Voulkos was leaving clay ones. After a decade of stacking, slashing and cantilevering pots—attempting to stretch their skins into more evocative sculptural…
Ganoksin is the worlds largest educational internet site for the jewelry, gemology and metals field. We also offer an online orchid community which has emerged from this project. Learn more
© Copyright 2019 · All Rights Reserved · Ganoksin · Privacy Policy | Terms of Use