Over the last week I have been scrambling to get a mould made that was a little beyond my carving skill. The design provided was within my skill level, however the request was for a double sided token with wording on the back, and whilst my carving ability is fine for a few words in well… my best hand carved font, this required more words than I would normally be willing to carve, as it’s not just the carving of the words, but the remembering that it all has to be backwards for it to work in the mould.
With this challenge ahead of me I thought it was a good time to experiment with a slightly cheating, slightly non period method of creating the back half of the mould that I have been pondering on and off for the last few years. The complete mould would be a composite of a soapstone hand carved front piece and a composite constructed rear mould made from etched copper and plaster. This would allow me to easily create new rear pieces for any token with easily etched detailed writing or flat designs. Whilst the back piece would appear to be a more modern process, on most tokens it would only be there to provide context to the token and therefore would mostly be hidden during wearing.
After discovering a blog post several months ago about how to use a laser printer to transfer toner to a piece of copper to use as etch resist I was armed with all of the necessary skills to create my experiment, and when this job turned up with a rather short timeline I everything fell into place. Unfortunately as these tokens are to be presented I will not provide photo’s just yet, however I will go into a few more of the details of creating the mould.
After carving the front face of the token into a rather nice piece of soapstone, I then drilled three locating nipples around the carved mould so that the back mould can be located each time. I then proceeded to construct the back mould. The back mould will consist of a copper plate that is etched suspended in the correct location by a plaster block. After etching the copper plate with the lettering on it I soldered some anchor tabs into the back of it so that it would be held firm to the plaster once it set. I then mounted the copper plate in the correct position on the soapstone front face mould using bluetak, this allowed me to position it correctly and have it sit the correct distance from the face of the mould. I then constructed a mould around the soapstone so that I could pour in wet plaster. Once the plaster had set I removed the mould and the plaster from the soapstone and let the plaster sit for a few days drying. Plaster is very good at retaining water, so it’s best to either leave it for at least another 24 hours after the first 24 hours it takes for the plaster to set, or artificially dry the mould in an oven on very low for 3-6 hours.
In a few weeks time I shall update you on how successful the process is and how well the plaster and copper mould works, for now I can only tell you that initial testing is promising and that future un-hurried testing may produce much better results.
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