The stone foundation of the water tank I’m building for this year’s challenge is quite large. Once it was designed, I realized that I did not have enough stones (that’s never been an issue before, by the way!!), so Little Man and I decided to try our hand at resin casting. I went by our local sign company and asked Miss Lagina if she had any scrap PVC foam board and she loaded me up. Now realize, I have never worked with this material before so I did not have any idea how well this stuff could be milled and shaped other than the insights gained from this community here. WOW, I love PVC foam board. It mills like wood, is easily glued together, can be shaped with woodworking hand tools, and on and on and on. I haven’t looked up the structural properties yet to see how it compares with wood, but I will soon. I will be going back to see Miss Lagina again.
Sorry for wandering. Ok, I followed Dave’s technique of cutting strips of the foam board and then used a wood gouge to simulate the surface of cut stone.
That is not an easy venture by the way. It took me about an hour to shape those two strips. I actually shaped them while they were a single strip and then ripped it on the table saw to get the two strips. Then I had to go back and re-shape the cut edge on both pieces. Next I cut the strips into individual stones, again using the table saw and a simple jig to get them all the same length. Now each stone has a cut edge on each end so I had to re-shape the ends. My hats off to Dave and his crew over at Taylor Stone. I did not make very many stones for my first attempt and I was tired when I got through with all the shaping. I can only imagine what Dave went through to make his masters. Thanks Dave for all you do.
So here are my masters. As I said, I did not make many to start with because I wanted to see how well they turned out before I committed to making a bunch.
I built a mold box out of some styrene I had laying around. I used hot glue to hold each master in place in the box.
My first mistake occurred here. I don’t think you can see it in the photo, but the stones are not setting completely flat against the bottom of the box. I noticed this once they had been glued down and tried to press them down tightly, but apparently either the bottoms of the stones were not flat or the hot glue prevented them from sitting flat. Regardless, that impacted the mold. It did not prevent the mold from being used, but I had to do a lot of cleanup to get the mold ready for resin. It turned out not to be a major mistake, but I learned a valuable lesson which is the whole point of this process, right?
Gotta go put a brisket on the BGE. I’ll be back to show you the final product in a little while.
