This is my first attempt and creating a resin pen blank. Samara helped with the concept for these pen blanks. She wanted to combine gold for her and orange for Asher.
Setup:
I mixed 51 grams of each “A” & “B” part of Amazing Clear Cast resin. We added three drops of Alumilite Orange dye and one scoop Solar Gold Pearl Ex powder to the “A” side of the resin before mixing with part “B”. 102 grams of resin was not enough to fill both cavities of the mold that I made.
Demold:
The pen blanks came out of the mold easily although I could tell immediately that they were not quite what I expected. I’m encouraged by the look of the top surface. Once polished it might make a nice pen. The side of the blank is rough however, showing little bumps where there were surface bubbles in the mold. I decided to round out one to see what a pen might look like. The resin still needed days to cure and I found that there was significant flex in the resin. I could actually bend the blanks by hand. This pour drove home the lesson that demold time is not the same as cure time. I knew the pen blanks would need to cure but had thought the resin would be harder after the demold time elapsed.
Observations:
I did not level the board holding the mold in the pressure pot and one end of the pen blank ended up 3/4″ while the other is only 1/2″. Since I was unable to degas the silicone, the mold has tiny bubbles along sides. I made the mold out of Alumilite High Strength 3 which should have set without bubbles. I think air must have clung to the HDPE blocks I used to form the blank cavities. The bottom of the mold lacks dimensional stability. Being maybe a 1/4″ thick the blanks cast in it tend to have a slight curve on the bottom, conforming to whatever it’s sitting on.