help casting Sankara Stones from Temple of Doom

L.S.,

I am a rookie when it comes to prop-making and, after just hanging around here, this is my first post.

I am trying to make some Sankara stones from Indiana Jones ToD. As it stands i have successfully created my first mold, and am experimenting with casting. The idea is to make both the village versions as well as the translucent versions. Although I'm still clowning-around with the village version (shape, paint job and whatnot) it feels doable. With the casting, however, I run into some issues. I'm hoping you can give me some pointers to move in the right direction.

As you can see in the picture below, my cast is fairly 'massive' in the sense that the opacity doesn't resemble the prop. This is partly due to the fact that I start of with a yellowish resin, rather than a clear one. I'm open to trying a clear resin, but it would still need coloring. This is where I have my second issue. The texture: The prop seems to have cracks and inside veins/coloring. Mine is either a solid singe color (not pictured) or (with use of plastic shards) very rough/unsophisticated.

I'm planning on doing a clear cast with less coloring, as well as making the inside space (for the LED) larger (so more light will come through). I'm guessing that would help?

What can I do or use to make the internal structure a bit better. It would seem I have to break op the solid cast. Do I add something? Do I cast in multiple layers?

Any tips, pointers & ideas are welcome. Thanks in advance,

Harm

Pretty gutsy effort for the first project.

If I was making this prop, I'd probably have the light in a base or stand so that it lights the stone for display only. Looks like you have attempted the FX stone.

What resin did you use?

Making internal cracks is a challenge at best. One member did this with a Fertility Idol by using Perspex shards coated in release agent, That way, the resin never stuck and the part was visible.

Calling this 'gutsy' doesn't really imbue the confidence I was looking for ;-) (And as it stands, most instances where I've been considered gutsy came from me not knowing what I was getting into ;-) But thanks for the reply anyway.

Shards is something I've tried, but they're hard to position and don't seem to work well with my current resin (a generic hardware store repair polyester). I'll try the shards again with a clear resin, but remain open for further suggestions

harmgrooten said:

Calling this 'gutsy' doesn't really imbue the confidence I was looking for ;-) (And as it stands, most instances where I've been considered gutsy came from me not knowing what I was getting into ;-) But thanks for the reply anyway.

Shards is something I've tried, but they're hard to position and don't seem to work well with my current resin (a generic hardware store repair polyester). I'll try the shards again with a clear resin, but remain open for further suggestions

Click to expand...

What I meant was molding a part like this as your first project is pretty gutsy. I didn't get into molding and casting for about 2 years after I joined this forum.

Why not just go with fiberglass? Its not a material I enjoy or prefer to use but in this instance it may fit the bill.

So, it's been a while... but made a bit more progress. As it turns out, the shard method didn't work because the resin got too hot during curing and melted the shards in the proces.

I used a different resin, and decided to create structure with beads instead of shards... which actually came out pretty well (although up close you can recognize them as beads. But playing with the colour of the beads and resin will solve that.)

Made a simple LED-light inside with two contacts at the bottom, plus a simple clay base. As a proof of concept it works. Now I just have to find time to make a "perfect" version ;-)