• Coldcasting Tutorial

Edited 27th October 2017 - Originally posted October 28th 2016

In this tutorial I will go through "coldcasting" - in other words casting resin with real metal powders. 

The general idea behind coldcasting is to add a fairly large ammount of metal powder into the resin - after the resin has cured it will keep some of the properties of the respective metal like weight, shine and feel. Some usual metals that are used for coldcasting are aluminium, copper, brass and bronze.

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So to start things of - these are the materials that will be used for this tutorial. The powder I'll use in this tutorial is copper.

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Start of by mixing the two parts of your resin together (Keep in mind that you need a lot less resin than usual due to the powder adding a lot of volume to the mix)

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Here comes the tricky part of this tutorial; how much powder you should use. The general ammount should be somewhere between 30-50%, this differs between each material though, so you'll need to look into this/ just try between each different material. There's a lot of trial and error to this, if you use too much you may risk the finished cap/ stem being too brittle, and using too little might give a faded/ incomplete look to the cast. A thumb rule that I personally use is to pour in powder until the pile that builds up goes up to the surface of the resin. This is just for the cups that I use though, so you have to try this out yourself to master the technique.

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Just mix it all together and pour it into the mold

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Here's what the cap looks like right after demolding. Most coldcasts have a very different look before polishing as a layer of resin stops the metal from getting its shine. After a polishing session using metal wool, this is what the finished cap turned out like:

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After wet-sanding for a couple of minutes, here's what the finished cap looks like! To find out how a copper powder-coated cap looks like compared to a coldcasted one, be sure to check out• Powdercoating tutorial

Hope you learned something from this guide, for any questions/ suggestions for future tutorials, feel free to contact me!