I can't believe it's been so long since I set this down. I'm always thinking about it but can't always get to it plus I was dreading the whole molding process.
The first thing I did was to drill a bunch of holes in this block of wood to place all the quills. Since they are all different sizes I wanted to get them back in their respective holes.
Then came the sucky part, building the walls with water based clay around the mouth. I had nightmares about molding the mouth but I finally jumped on it.
You can see the green tint from the PVA I sprayed on. I love PVA!
Next came the Smoothon Epoxacoat Red. This stuff is awesome. It is stiff enough not to sag or run but fluid enough to get into all the nooks and
crannies pretty easily.
I did 2 coats of the Red then moved onto to Smoothon Epoxamite 101 (fast). I will use the medium cure next time as I ended up having to mix a bunch of small batches because it would set up to fast. I started on the neck area first intending to build a wall so later I could just pour the mouth full. I did do that and it worked
great.
Here it is after I cleaned off the clay and dremeled the edges.
You can see I had very little touch up sculpting to do.
I made I little blunder that I noticed here. The area around the lower tusks should have been molded a little different as I believe if I didn't do 2 separate mold parts here it would probably have locked up on me. Shoot this thing may lock up on me anyway.
I guess we will all find out together. So here are the 2 pieces I had to do.
Here I drew the separation line for the next piece. I used a small knife and cut the line. I decided to try shims as I believe it is the way the pros do it. After doing
some research I found that coated playing cards are what some folks use. So far the seems to work great.
I would place the card in the cut line and mark the shape then pull the card out, cut it, and place it back in. I taped the seams.
This is all new to me but so far I like it. I guess those pros know a few things.
Once again you can see the green tint of the PVA and then onto the 2 red coats.
That's it for now. I hope to have some fiber glass photos up tomorrow. Thanks for checkin in.