Foam curiousity?

Hi everyone,

I have been reading up and sourcing foam and I started to think!! (uh-oh).
Are there any techniques that have been tried using the canisters of expanding foam from the DIY store? I am still quite 'wet behind the ears' as such and as they are more readily available to me, they may be an alternative to use.
Thanks for reading this and any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I can maybe add a little view for you

the issue with most of the minimum and regular expansion crack/insulator foams is they are very irregular.
its nearly impossible to control the foam as it jettisons the straw, so at best you'll use them as a backing material
for filling up resin busts, making resin skins stronger, making mold jackets thicker, etc.

but as for how it compares to A/B cold foams, it does not. there is so much more control and ability when you use
A/B mixes, you can chill it to give yourself 15 seconds of extra pot life, you can rotocast it, you can layer, fill, skin, and do
so many things with it that you'll struggle and fight to do anything reasonable with out of the spray can

it is what its designed to be and that's an insulator and gap stop.

hope that helps a little

if you need a recommendation for cold foam MPFX sells an awesome hard and soft cold foam made by Procast.
here's their site, I'd recommend 4lb foam in both hard and soft for just about everything

Special Effects Makeup Supplies - Motion Picture F/X

I've recently bought some of the A/B stuff to use in some casting I hope to be doing.
Since your in the UK Scot, I got mine here: Polyurethane Foam - mbfg.co.uk

You can get 1.5kg for like £20! as has been said the spray stuff can be very messy, it forms irregular bubbles, hard & soft area's etc & it sticks to everything.
If you have a looky on Youtube, you'll find some nice vids on A/B type foams.

HTH

I'm a big supporter of the FlexFoamIt! series by smoothon for cold expanding foams. It's self-skinning and produces very little bubbles at the higher numbers (X, 17, and 25) although it's more dense and less expanding as the numbers increase. Wrex, the Judoon, and Wrex's feet were all done in the X. If you're looking to cast INTO something, I'd recommend this one. If you're looking for a foam to carve down to shape, you probably need to find something like insulation foam (or pink foam) on the cheaper end.

Depends what you're trying to make. There's a gal over in germany that makes lots of her props by carving expanding foam and then paper mache-ing it so that it's got a solid outer shell that covers up all the air holes.

About my love to expanding foam ? Kamui Cosplay

Emmabellish said:

Depends what you're trying to make. There's a gal over in germany that makes lots of her props by carving expanding foam and then paper mache-ing it so that it's got a solid outer shell that covers up all the air holes.

About my love to expanding foam ? Kamui Cosplay

Click to expand...

That's really cool!! :cool :thumbsup

Couple of tip's if your going to have a go with the spray stuff:

Wear gloves!! if you get it on your hands you'll need a knife to get it off.
You'll need to use your hands to reposition it as seems to have a mind of its own.
It doesn't like staying put on vertical surfaces, you'll be fighting gravity & you could end up with a big pile on the floor
As in the link above, use small bits at a time to build it up into something bigger, try not to spray too much out in one go.

HTH