The solution seems to be a 4-1 mix of bee’s wax to modelling wax. It produces a wax that is not as brittle once set and can be removed from a mould without cracking or breaking. The wax ends up a nice fleshy pink colour due to the red modelling wax. It also has a nice modelling quality, being sturdy enough to maintain its shape though flexible enough to model with some great detail.  The awesome thing is it really seems to have the best of both of the waxes in the sense that the bee’s wax stands up better to ambient heat whilst the modelling wax is easy to manipulate.  I look forward to experimenting further with this combination.

I have also managed to salvage a mould that I had previously thought lost.  The M4470 compound I’m using seems rather brittle but sticks to itself really well.  This means that if you haven’t used enough mould release the mould tends to rip and crumble rather than come apart nicely.  This is fine for simple 2 sided tokens and stuff, but when moulding more complicated shapes it makes it difficult to remove the moulded material without damaging it or the mould itself (usually the latter).

1. Forget the experimentation and carve a back for the mould out of soapstone, basically going with an option that is known to work
2. Try again with a different medium and hope that the experiment will produce at least 25 usable tokens.  If I did go with this option I would consider using clay as the main alternative medium as I believe it would hold together better.

Another option is to get some hard wax for lost wax casting and use the current mould to make wax tokens that I then add to a huge wax tree and cast 30-40 tokens in one go.   I’m tempted to ask for help from a friend on this one, as I need to have the tokens made by Monday and I’m daunted by the task of having to hand carve the text.  Though the idea of doing lost wax casting is also interesting.

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.

The token I was having so much difficulty with.  As you can see the technique I described below doesn’t completely stop the artefacts, however to completely get rid of those I need to control the temperatures and humidity a lot better than I can in a shed when it’s raining.

Though I will stick up photo’s on my Flickr on say.. maybe.. possibly… around… in a round about way… say… Tuesday.

So this weekend I had a lazy Friday night (I was meant to go to the Pirate night at the Uni, but well… A better offer presented itself, and I spend a lazy night chatting and watching umm… something on DVD. Saturday was slightly more energetic with 2 hours volunteering at the Archery Club moving paver’s, can’t wait to see how it comes out. In the afternoon I hung out washing, and sorted some stuff to make more than just a walk way through my bedroom.

Sunday I spent doing not much… followed by a little more washing, some sorting through stuff, and then moving a trailer and hacking off some bits of it so that a new towing frame can be constructed for it. All in all it was a very lazy weekend… though I am looking forward to the town archer weekend next weekend. I might even turn up to Pot Luck feast, if I can be arsed to get some food together for it.

As for this coming week, I need to finish off the soapstone mould for the College War Tokens, and then cast 50-60 of them when the pewter arrives. The mould I started whilst teaching a pewter casting class in Rowany is surprisingly OK by my standards, so I just need to add a little more detail, and cast a large batch in the next week or ten days. Whilst it’s a little flimsy for my liking, it still does work as intended so should be fine to be used as a small token for college war.