Start of Mik’s 2017, and first day of construction. As I had promised young Devon, I would teach or show you all what and how to make your own cut stones.
Of course the end products are cast resin from RTV silicon molds. This is how I do it! It is not the only way, I’m sure, but this is what I took away from Ray Dunakin’s postings.
I cut my masters ( that I cast into the RTV Silicon molds) from 3 mm Sintra board. Why 3 mm cause thats what I have, and I wanted them to be not to thick as they were to be a veneer and not stick out to far from the base that they were mounted on. Any thickness that you have will work, use what you have.
Stones and bricks come in all sizes, but most all are 1:2 in ratio of height to width. This allows for offset of the courses and stacking. It also allows for the making of patterns when laying, such as herringbone and basket weave. Working with the 1:2 is the easiest. Also needed are 1/2 blocks and 1/4 to allow for fitting around things like doors and windows. The smaller sizes are also used as architectural highlights to add design elements into the stone work.
Let’s get started. I picked a size of 1ft x 2ft in 1:20.3 scale. I started by setting up my mini saw to rip long strips to the correct 1ft scale size.
Cut more then enough, The set that I cast had 75 pieces in it, some of all sizes. You don’t want to be casting a lot of sheets of only a few stones, so cut plenty of strips.
Now for the actual carving, I use a very cheep little carving gouge that I picked up somewhere over the years. I have seen these sets some times in Harbor Freight, and craft stores. Cheep is the thing here.
What we want to do is take little shallow nick cuts all over the entire surface of the long strip that we had cut.
Random is what we are looking for and small little nick cuts.
Do this for the entire length of the strips, Make sure that you cut from all directions by turning the strip around, and work from both ends, Again what were looking for is a total random pattern. Don’t be afraid to cut some deeper then others and to nick and cut down the sides also.
I have found it most helpful to just keep cutting away on the strips, It makes a bit of a mess but a TV table and a good movie work well together.
Once you have as many strips carved to your satisfaction, then we need to cut them down into individual stones. I set up my mini saw to cut to length by marking to the desired length with blue painters tape, and then cut to length. The full stones, and the 1/2 stones along with the 1/4 stones can be cut from the same strips. I also made a couple of extra long stones for window and door headers. You will be best served for the long 1/2 blocks to cut narrow strips and carve them by themselves.
After cutting the individual stones, I then go back and dress the cut ends with several cuts and nicks to make them look like the sides.
So Go Get Started, Lesson two will cover some added detail stones.
