Alright, so things have still been happening, but this has been a bit of a process of trial and error.
The molds for everything are all done, and they cast perfectly - no problems, no bubbles, no nothing. In that sense, I am at least reasonably able! And the cold cast parts feel great - really nice and heavy, especially the bronze.
My problem has to do with the actual finishing of the parts. The
cold cast bronze parts are coming out okay with simple steel wool polishing, but the
cold cast aluminum is not inspiring a ton of confidence. Here's a look:
Quite happy with the finish on that - it's simply polished. The orb exteriors you see in that picture were spraypainted black, and then I sanded the paint off the outer surfaces, polishing them up. This helps make the recesses darker, which I think is necessary, but they're not quite as shiny as I would have hoped for. I might try using shoe polish in the recesses instead or something - I need something to make the holes darker. And before it's suggested, yes, I am mixing black dye in with the cold casts!
But here's an example of some of the aluminum problems I'm having:
Steel wool, high grit sandpaper, polishing wheels, even tried a headlight buffing kit to try and bring these things up to a good and consistent shine, but I end up with somewhat blotchy looking finishes on the flat surfaces. I'm not really happy with that.
Every polishing wheel I've tried on the orb exteriors gets shredded pretty quickly due to the design of the part.
Any suggestions? Anything obvious I'm missing? This is the only thing keeping me from getting final assembly done on some of these things, since I'm not really happy with the look of the aluminum parts.
Also: There are
non-cold-cast finishes I could try that would probably be a lot easier and consistent, but end up not having the weight or authentic shine of the cold cast metallics. Would people consider that an adequate substitute?