Molding a wax figure, any tips?

[ThrowingChicken]

Hello all,

I am not exactly a mold-making novice, but I've been honored with the task of molding a figure sculpted from hard toy wax, which is a material I have never used before.

My planned mold making process is not too dissimilar from what is seen here - Dan Perez Studios

But I am worried that the process of building up the clay walls will put marks on the wax original. I did a fingernail test on an unexposed part and it did leave a mark, so that makes me a little weary. Is there any trick to doing this, besides a whole hell of a lot of patients and a steady hand?

 

[exoray]

To avoid damage before getting a mold, simply cast it in a solid blob of translucent silicone, and then cut it out carefully, OK no so carefully you will almost certainly destroy it either way if it's soft...

If you make a nice solid re-usable wood form to cast the blob, it will serve as a dual purpose casting form to help hold the registration of the cut apart silicone mold when you are molding... You can even place registration dimples in the wood form itself, those will act as a reverse registration points once the cut pieces are assembled and then placed back into the form...

At this point you have two options, for a short run that mold will likely be fine, but if you want to create a cleaner mold then take the most awesome hard resin pull from that mold (if you use a slow set resin it will degas and have almost no measurable shrinkage) then recast that hard resin pull after some minor clean up using the technique you linked to above...

I do the above when I'm molding small clay sculptures, as there really isn't a 'good' way IMO to get clean parting lines on a clay sculpture without causing damage...

 

[TheSt.LouisKid]

When I worked at McFarlane Toys many of the figures were made in wax. They wouldn't clay up the mold. The mold makers would pour silicone all over the parts and cut them out of the mold. I know a lot of hacks do it that way but the shop supervisor would make scooping scallopy slices when he cut the wax parts free from the silicone and those scallop cuts kept the mold halves from shifting and acted as meshing teeth in mold halves.