First, here are all of the resin pieces that I have created from my silicone rubber molds:

The first and obviously difficult thing to do was to cast the emitter tip in clear resin. Its small size and my desire to make it as bubble-free as possible caused me a few headaches, but I managed to wangle it quite nicely. After my first few tries I was shattered however. The castings were not only full of bubbles, it looked like a can of soda had exploded inside the mold before the resin cured. It was that bad.

Of course I had the answer to this problem always in the back of my head: In my greenness I had foolishly attempted to pour the resin without degassing it first, because I shied away from the effort of building a vacuum chamber. No matter how cautiously I tried to mix the resin, the result was always a disaster.

So, I finally realized that there was no way around it: I had to build a vacuum chamber to be able to suck all of the trapped air bubbles out of the resin before pouring it into the mold. So I got myself a few components and started building: A small low-cost vacuum pump, a big stainless steel pot, some thick plexi as the lid, a flexible hose, a few connectors / valves and a rubber mat as a sealing gasket.

Putting it all together is pretty self-explainatory: I drilled two holes into the plexi, one for the hose that is connected to the pump and one for the valve which enabled me to re-pressurize the pot after the procedure. Then I connected the hose and added the rubber mat to the underside of the plexi to make the lid airtight.

Et voilà – my very own vacuum chamber! Not as difficult to build as I thought and it works like a charm! Resin degassed in there is almost bubble-free and cures beautifully.

Looking at the degassing procedure makes clear how impossible it is to get a bubble-free casting without it. There are a lot more tiny bubbles inside a resin mixture than you would ever imagine. Exposing them to a vacuum makes them visible, lets them grow bigger, rise to the surface and finally breaks them.

Bubbles or not, it is still very difficult to get the resin inside a mold this small though, because it is quite viscous. I use disposable pipettes to be able to allot the resin in small doses.

After the mold is about half-way full, I stop and use a toothpick to catch any bubbles that might have been caught inside the mold and try to push them away from the inner mold wall. This way no holes are created in the casting, even though those bubbles are still trapped inside and obviously visible. That’s not always possible to prevent. When I think I got them all, I continue and fill up the mold.

And here you can see the result. Almost bubble-free castings which will look fabulous when lit up by the electronics from behind.

The next element that required a special casting technique was the display panel:

Well, it didn’t exactly require a special technique, but I decided to do it a little differently from how it might normally be done to make it look more seamless.

The normal way of casting this would be to incorporate a hole into the master model so that the electronics could be inserted into the casting, which naturally also would feature this “window”. The other possibility would have been to work this hole into each casting, similarly as I did with the battery door of my ODN Scanner replica. With this experience under my belt however, I decided that I didn’t want to do it like this again because it’s just too elaborate.

Instead I put the LED digits inside the mold before pouring in the resin. This way the electronics get embedded into the resin and actually become one with the panel itself.

Doing this, a precise placement of the electronic components inside the mold is obviously vital. If they are not placed exactly right, they will later appear askew, which is of course not desirable. Also, the spaces from each short side must be enough to account for the screws and switches that are going to be placed there later.

To be able to leave the soldering joints on the back of the LEDs blank, I used one of the smaller molds (the one from the Emitter Base Strip) as a placeholder to put the components in their place and keep the resin from completely encapsulating them. That’s also why I made the master model for the panel slightly thicker than the LED digits, to have some room to work with. Just in case you were wondering.

While pouring the resin inside the mold, I gently push down the placeholder to keep the resin from creeping under the LEDs and between them and the rubber placeholder piece.

Unfortunately it is impossible to prevent this resin creep completely. Some of it always manages to get where it shouldn’t:

Thankfully thin layers of resin can be removed quite easily. After cleaning out all of the excess resin flash and sanding the surface flat, it looks like this:

The front is also usually affected be resin creep, …

… but just as easy to clean up:

The result is an extremely sleek element that looks like it was made from one piece, because it essentially is. No ridges, no crevices. Smooth as an android’s bottom, as it were.

As you can obviously see, I also experimented with dyeing the resin to make all the parts black. This worked so well that I won’t even have to prime and paint these parts since they basically look perfect right out of the mold. It’s also more accurate since the original prop was also made from black resin.

Following this thought, I also gave the end piece a special treatment to make it look like something made from metal rather than resin. To achieve this, I filled the resin with aluminum powder before pouring it into the mold. The more powder you use, the more the part will be made up from actual aluminum. And as such it will naturally look more like a metal piece, be a bit heavier than usual and also feel a little cold to the touch. Very cool indeed (pun intended) and a lot better than spray-painting a resin piece silver.

Coming out of the mold, this is not immediately obvious, though. The part has a dark grey color with a slight yellow tint coming from the kind of resin I use which usually has a beige kind of color.

Once you sand over the whole piece however, the aluminum particles inside the resin show themselves and the surface gets nice and shiny, looking very metal-like. And the best part is that it is scratch-resistant since this metallic appearance is not only on the surface like a delicate layer of paint but comes from the material itself which is two thirds actual aluminum!

Here are both side by side to see the difference before and after sanding.

All the other parts were pretty straight forward: I dyed my resin black, filled the molds and got beautiful looking pieces out of them. Everything just looks more badass in black.

And here are all of them together, again:

Not casting-related, but following up on my last blog post, I also wanted to show you what I’ll be using as the disc for the end cap. As I said in the last post, I wanted to use the real deal, which looked like acrylic to me from the photos of the original prop. So I got some discs lasered from 1mm thin black plexi by a fellow prop builder who has access to a laser cutter. Thanks again, Christoph!

The disc will also serve as a door to conceal the charging port for the built-in rechargeable battery. If everything goes according to plan, the door will be screwed on to the actual charging port, looking totally seamless from outside, without any sign of a door. Just the way I like it and did it before with my Voyager Desktop Computer replica. More on that in the next post.

Now that I have everything I need, I can finally start assembling! Yay!

To watch my progress, follow me on Twitter @trekprops and be sure to check back here soon to see the finished replica. If you have any questions, please also feel free to leave a comment below or E-Mail me at info@trekprops.de.

If you want to make more than one unit of any given prop replica, it is inevitable to make molds of all the parts you need. This way you’ll be able to make multiple resin casts of each piece. For the Neutrino Probe, this presented a few unique challenges I had to tackle along the way due to the special nature of the body, its prototype parts and the fact that I wanted to put electronics in there. In this blog post I’ll show you exactly what I thought would work, what did’t work and – most importantly – what I ended up doing.

If you remember, the main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) consists of five pieces – some of them big and some of them rather small.

Let’s begin with the main piece, which was the trickiest to mold. Why was it so tricky?

Well, for one it had to be hollow for me to be able to install the electronics later. To do that I needed enough room inside to fit the circuit in. However, due to the large grooves on the outside it was difficult to estimate how much I could hollow out without risking to break through one of the grooves. Therefore everything had to be measured exactly.

The other aspect was that the master model for the main part obviously was round since I turned it from wood. The actual prop part however needed to have one flat side where the display panel would go. How should I approach this? Cut off the unwanted piece before molding? No. Being out of wood, the material could easily have ripped thus ruining the entire thing. Also, being round it would’ve been difficult to get a grip on it and make a clean cut. Lastly, it would have been too final a solution for my taste. Had I cut off too much of it, I would’ve had no way to correct that mistake. So, I decided to solve the problem by molding only as much of the prototype as I needed and not one millimeter more. I’ll explain below.

To be able to do precise work, the first thing I did was to mark a line on the prototype where I wanted the flat side to be:

My first idea was to suspend the piece in silicone rubber by hanging it from wires (that’s what the small holes in the picture above are for) and pouring rubber in the mold below, until the pencil line was reached. What I didn’t take into consideration however, was that wood actually floats, not only on water but also on silicone rubber. Duh! So when I poured the silicone inside the mold and it reached the master model, it slowly began to move upwards, sinking my plan (pun intended ;)) millimeter by millimeter.

So, I needed a new plan. And one was quickly found. It was slightly more elaborate, but worked perfectly. Here’s what I did:

Since molding only part of the master model didn’t work, I decided to do a full-blown two-part mold with a lid that I could later take off. And that lid should be exactly where the pencil line was. The first step to accomplish this was to use a scrap piece of cured silicone from the first try and use it as the “floor” for the new mold box. Yes, you can saw cured rubber quite well. On top of that I built the box walls using LEGO as I always do. Around that I put some plasticine to seal the box and fix it in place.

Having everything absolutely level is important if you don’t want to produce crooked castings. That’s why I always check using a water level before molding.

Next I placed the prototype part inside the mold box and secured it using two strips of tape. Any type will do. I arranged it in such a way that the pencil line on the body was parallel to the “floor” of the mold box.

I then poured a little bit of silicone in the box, just enough so that the master model was covered up to the pencil line.

And this is how the silicone looked like when it was cured. This was gonna be my lid.

In order to continue, I then had to clean up the lid a little in an effort to make it as flat as possible. So I removed the excess rubber using scissors…

… as well as cutting pliers.

As preparation for the next step I then applied (quite a lot of) vaseline on the exposed area of the silicone as a releasing agent.

In this next image you can clearly see the applied vaseline and the brush strokes on it.

Then I reinserted the master model inside the mold…

… and secured it again using tape to prevent it from floating up as it did before.

Then I poured in silicone once more.

Note that I only covered the piece by about half. Why? Well, I couldn’t leave the tape in there to keep the prototype in place, so I needed something else. That’s what this intermediate layer of silicone was for.

When it cured it acted as a grip to keep the part where it was supposed to be and I could extend the box walls (the white LEGO pieces in the next picture) and fill up the mold. Without any vaseline in between, the silicone became one piece in the end, which is exactly what I wanted.

After demolding I was able to seperate the two pieces of the mold without any problems.

Getting the master model out of the mold was a little tricky, since so much of its round form was inside the mold, but thanks to the flexible nature of silicone rubber that became no serious problem.

After a little cleanup I was very happy with the result:

Now on to the next challenge: Making the casting hollow. Since my “resin displacement”-technique worked so well with the ODN Scanner, I didn’t think twice to use this method again here. The idea is to manufacture a rubber displacer piece on a stick that can be lowered down into the mold before filling it with resin. Afterwards it can be removed, making the final piece hollow.

To create this rubber displacer, I prepared a wooden beam with three screws, only partially screwed into the handle. This is where the rubber would stick to the grip. Inside the mold I used some of the clay that I use to prevent mold boxes from leaking to form a temporary mold for the displacer. The tricky thing here was to estimate how thick the walls and how big the displacer should be. I ended up making the mold rather large, thinking that I could always remove some of the cured silicone from the displacer piece to make it smaller. No correction would have been possible in the other direction.

(By the way, that’s what I ended up doing – shaping and correcting the cured rubber by cutting and sanding away material until it was just right.)

This is how the displacer grip looks like lowered down into the mold.

In this shot you can clearly see the screws that will dip into the silicone and attach the displacer to the wooden stick.

All filled up with some RTV rubber:

And this is how the complete mold looks like after demolding and cleaning up:

A perfect fit!

Now, if you have paid attention, then you know that the very first sentence of this post after the break actually isn’t correct. The main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) isn’t made up of five, but of six pieces. The sixth very important piece is the display panel, which closes the main body and houses the 7-segment-LEDs for the readout. I built it from three layers of sheet styrene, glued together and filed to shape.

Slightly thicker than the LED component I’m using. Why that is? You’ll see… in the next blog post.

Three layers of sheet styrene glued together.

The usual game: File, putty, sand, prime, sand, prime, and so on…

And here’s the finished panel. So why didn’t I build this piece earlier? Well, simple: I didn’t know the exact dimensions I needed before molding the main body element of the probe where this part needed to fit on. So, logically, I couldn’t build it until the mold for the main body part was done.

Molding-wise this piece was very easy. I attached it to a board, built the usual mold box around it, and filled it with rubber.

And the finished mold:

Now if you’re thinking “Wait a minute, aren’t those LED digits supposed to be installed into that element? Don’t you need a hole in there for them?”, then you’re thinking right. I’m going to show you how I’m doing that in the next blog post!

The next piece to mold with an interesting story is the emitter. As you might remember from this blog post, I built one using styrene, putty and primer way back after I did the main parts of the probe. It consisted of two very small pieces and looked like this:

And here it is together with the rest of the business end:

It looked very nice and I was quite happy with my work considering that these pieces are so tiny.

However, I came to realize that they were not precise enough and more importantly not smooth enough. Because here’s the deal: Of course the emitter had to be cast in clear resin so that it could be illuminated from the back. For the casting to be absolutely transparent and clear, two conditions had to be met: The casting had to be bubble-free (more on that in the next blog post) and the surface of the prototype had to be absolutely, 100% smooth. If it hadn’t, the silicone would’ve translated all the irregularity, texture and roughness – as subtle as it might have been – into the mold which would’ve produced castings with a milky, frosted surface and not a glass-like bright finish.

So I reached out to fellow prop-builder Myron Stapleton who has both the experience and the equipment to turn parts from aluminum to measure. I prepared some very detailed specs for him and what I got back matched those dimensions exactly:

I couldn’t believe the accuracy with wich Myron replicated my diagrams. This is truly the work of a master. Thank you so much, Myron!

The molding process for this piece was no different than the rest: Put it on a board in a mold box and fill it up with silicone. The one thing I had to be careful with was the speed with which I poured the rubber inside the mold. Pouring in a thin stream I carefully filled the box, paying close attention not to trap any air bubbles while covering all those ridges and crevices.

And here’s the final mold. While molding all the other pieces, I actually made a number of emitter molds so that I could later make several castings at once.

Molding the rest of the pieces was very straight forward. By now you know the drill, so I’m not going to repeat it once more. Just enjoy the pictures:

You’ll notice here that I sometimes used clay as a base for the pieces. The plasticine acted as a light adhesive and also prevented the silicone from creeping under the prototypes thus creating a thin rubber film which can make the demolding process problematic.

Looking at this last piece, which is the “end cap” of the Neutrino Probe, I realized that painting – or more precisely masking – this component would be quite elaborate since the disc at the top has a different color than the rest. Have a look at the original to see what I mean:

So I decided in the last minute not to include the back disc in the actual “end cap” casting, but to add it later and use the real deal (more on that in an upcoming blog post).

Instead of removing the disc from my original master model (the one which I turned from wood here), I used a resin casting of said master model to preserve the original.

If something had gone wrong, I simply had made another pull from the mold and started over. But, thankfully, there were no problems. First, I shaved off the majority of the top disc using my belt sander like this:

Then I used sandpaper stapled to a board to gently remove the rest. Wet sanding makes for a smoother surface.

After some priming and more sanding, the surface was perfectly smooth.

I noticed however, that the whole element was not tall enough and did not match the original prototype. I simply sanded off too much of the bottom of the casting to make the surface smooth.

So I used styrene to extend the element like this:

A few layers of putty and primer later, with a little sanding in between, the new “end cap” was finished and ready to be molded.

And here are all of the Neutrino Probe molds with their respective prototypes. Seven pieces in total, which is quite a lot, now that I’m looking at all of them together.

In the next blog post I will cover the casting process for these parts and the unique problems I had to solve to make that happen.

As always, if you want to follow my work more closely, you can follow me on Twitter (@trekprops) to get more frequent updates on what is happening in my workshop.

If you have any questions or observations, you can of course also E-Mail me or leave a comment below. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Silicone rubber is available in many variants of different chemical and mechanical properties. I use an additive cross-linked precison casting silicone with a working life of 25 minutes and a demolding time of 2 hours. The silicone is mixed from two components using a mixing ratio of 10:1 and cures to a translucent light blue color. It is highly elastic, has a good mechanical stability and is suited for molding of complex master models even if they show indentations.

Modulor direct link: Modasil EH 10:1

Because the finished prop was supposed to contain an electric circuit with a super bright red LED and five green sequencing lights, the mold had to be done in a way so that the later resin casting is hollow. This could only be achieved by doing two resin halves which were then put together. This circumstance didn’t make the task of molding the prototype any easier…

Here’s again the finished master model just like it was about to be duplicated. To reveal small imperfections, I already applied some coats of primer and then repaired whatever didn’t seem right.

Since both halves of the cast resin parts should be as symmetrical as possible, I marked the middle of the body using a pencil. This helped me to accurately shape the clay bed later.

Next I had to make sure the work surface was leveled. This is checked best using a spirit level. If the work surface is not leveled now, the seam line of the two resin halves will not be straight later and they won’t fit together.

The next step is the most difficult and time consuming part of making a two part mold: The master model has to be half embedded in clay to create the first half of the mold. The above mentioned marking on the body of the prototype now helped me.

Be sure not to use just some material for this but non-reactive clay to avoid inhibiting the chemical reaction of the two silicone rubber components. To ensure that, I use a clay that doesn’t contain any sulfates and is oil-based. It works very well together with the additive cross-linked precision casting silicone I use.

The master model has be mounted evenly on the work surface. I achieved that by sticking chunks of clay under it to stabilize it:

Next up is the task of shaping the clay bed. I started by putting material close around the prototype body and then worked my way away from it.

Now the mold box had to be created. It determines the final size of the mold. Most people use styrene or wood to construct this box and seal the corners with clay but I found that LEGO bricks work very well because they can be re-used every time to create boxes of different sizes and the buildup of the box is fast and easy..

Now comes the tricky part: The important thing is that exactly half of the model has to be embedded in the clay. This just alleviates the buildup of the kit later. Also very important is the fact that the clay needs to be aligned exactly to the body. There mustn’t appear any gaps between the model and the clay. This could be repaired later, but it’s easier to do it right here. So, precise modeling work is in order here!

Of course, the entire inside of the mold box has to be filled with clay. As you can see here, I first did this only roughly and then did the fine tuning later to get the surface smooth and to close all the gaps between prototype and clay.

Still quite some work to do here!

The next picture shows a pretty good progress on the clay bed. To do the shaping I use a putty knife which makes it easy to reach tricky areas, for example corners.

Remeber to wear gloves! Otherwise the clay will get stuck under your fingernails which is quite uncomfortable. Furthermore, the clay will get dirty rather quickly if it is exposed directly to your fingers even if you washed your hands before!

Here’s the result after a lot of work: The surface is now very smooth and there are no more gaps anywhere.

Next I used a pen shaped tool to create several small indentations in the clay around the model. They will later become pins as the silicone flows into them and cures. The other mold half will then again show these troughs and both halves will be perfectly aligned to each other.

This is important for creating solid castings by pouring the resin into the mold while both halves are closed. Even though this was not the type of casting I wanted to do, I nevertheless chose to implement this step because it’s not possible to add it later.

After I had enlarged the mold box up to the desired height, I was ready to pour the mixed silicone rubber into it:

The deepest areas have to be filled with rubber first to avoid air bubbles. For the same reason you should pour a thin stream so that bubbles cannot occur in the first place and those created by the mixing of the silicone components can break.

When the prototype is completely covered with silicone, you need to add at least one more centimeter in height to make sure the “base” of the mold is thick enough.

After the silicone has cured, the entire mold can be turned around, …

… the LEGO bricks can be dismantled and the clay can be removed. Be careful not to move the master model in any way. Note the above mentioned pins in the silicone.

Remaining clay residue has to be removed.

Most silicones are self-seperating, which means that the master model won’t get stuck to the rubber so it can easily be demolded. This however isn’t the case when silicone is poured onto silicone. In this case, the two rubber parts would bond together and become one piece.

So, to avoid enclosing the prototype into a solid block of rubber, I had to apply a release agent to the first mold half. I used vaseline for this, which I brushed on carefully. Don’t be stingy with the release agent! The more you apply, the easier the demolding process will be. Remember to mask the master model off to avoid blemishing it with brush marks which would be transferred to the new mold half.

After I had removed the masking tape, I repeated the above pictured step of pouring the silicone into the mold, waited until it had cured, demolded the prototype and disassembled the LEGO frame. Here’s the result:

The silicone mold is now finished and ready to be used for resin casting. However, if I had used this mold as it is to cast parts, they would have been solid just like the master model. This however, wasn’t my goal. I wanted to create two resin shells in which I could install electronics. So, I had to do a little more work on this mold to make that happen.

In order to get hollow resin shells I had to find a way to displace the resin that I would pour into the mold halves. The first step to achieve this was to use clay again to shape “walls” which had exactly the thickness that I wanted for the resin pieces later. Everything that I made out of clay here, would become resin later.

Note the recess for the LEDs!

Next, I placed wooden slats with screws in them over the mold. The screw heads had the purpose to attach themselves to the silicone rubber I was about to pour into the clay lined mold. This way I would have a comfortable handle to place the inner silicone displacement piece inside the mold later.

Here’s the result of this rather complex mold making process: two two-part mold halves (front side and back side, only one half is pictured) which produce two resin shells that fit exactly together (well, more or less since there’s always some excess resin that needs to be sanded off).

The development of the two most important parts for the ODN Scanner kit is thus complete and the buildup of the hero prop can now begin!

With every building project, there’s one essential question: What material am I gonna use? Well, in prop building there’s most of the time only one answer to this question and that is “styrene“. Styrene is nothing more than sheets of plastic which is available in several thicknesses. It is also used in other model building efforts, for example architectural models.

So, the first step of building the prototype was to cut out all of the needed pieces from styrene (I used styrene with a thickness of 1 mm). After I had determined the shape of these parts by drawing a blueprint, I printed them out and glued them onto the sheet of styrene using spray glue. Next up was cutting the pieces which I did using a sharp precision knife. After scorching the sheet two or three times, they can easily be broken off along a straight edge.

After that it’s no problem to remove the paper from the styrene. If it doesn’t come off easily, simply put it in luke warm water for a few minutes. Then, the edges of the styrene parts had to be sanded lightly to create clean edges. The opening which would later become the display window proved to be especially difficult. A lot of sanding work was necessary to achieve really straight lines and rounded corners. Very useful in this step was sanding under running water which requires a special kind of sandpaper but results in very little dust and a very smooth edge.

Here are all 24 seperate pieces which I marked with the respective codes to know which one belonged where.

To see if these pieces could fit together to result in the object of my wishes, I did a test fit and glued them together using removable masking tape:

Styrene is best glued together with a special plastic glue which joins the parts permanently:

I filled the inside of this open box with putty to gain additional material for the later sanding process of the corners and edges. I wanted to prevent creating a hole in the body which I would not be able to close again.

After I had closed the body, I sanded the hole object roughly to remove all of the sharp edges and corners.

Next up was the handle. Here I also did a test fit first to determine how I would have to glue the pieces together. Because the handle would have been too thin consisting of 1 mm styrene, I glued two identically shaped parts together to make it thicker.

To perfectly fit the handle onto the main body, I actually attached the respective parts to it while glueing them together.

As you can see, the edges of the handle were very raw. Because of this I again had to use putty and a lot of time to give the handle a sleek shape and a smooth surface. The complex form obviously didn’t make this easy for me. However, the time was well spent as you can see here:

Fits like a glove! However, the main body being curved and the inside of the handle being straight, small holes were visible in between which again had to be filled and sanded smooth.

After that, the complete body had to be sanded very carefully to make every surface smooth and to achieve the desired degree of roundness on all edges and corners. Because silicone rubber transfers each and every imperfection to the mold very rigorously, the master model has be as perfect as the final kit or prop is supposed to be. Mistakes made here are being carried all the way through to the final product and then have to be corrected on each casted part anew. So, a lot of work can be saved here by thinking everything through and doing things right.

I here fabricated one set of greeblies, which are normally being put on as the last step in the buildup of a prop, to see what the final look of the prop would be:

In the same way I did the handle, I also made the scanner array on the top of the prop above the recessed display area. This way I could simply plunge it on and then attach it.

Even if it doesn’t look that way, the construction of such a prop from scratch using the methods shown here is a lot of work! Sanding is by far the most time consuming task because you always spot another small blemish which has to be repaired or areas you are not satisfied with. Also, the whole process requires a lot of patience because it just takes very long if you want to do it right. Anyhow, the effort is well worth it especially when you see yourself making progress and getting the project somewhere.

So far, so good. The master model is finished. Next is Part II in which I describe how I made the silicone mold.