Birdhouse Process - Print & Mold

The print of the model was mostly successful.

I mostly winged it when it came to the size. I wanted the hole to be 25mm, a size suitable for a blue tit, but there’s also shrinkage in the kiln, about 20%. The hole can’t be too small if I’m making a plaster mold out of it because the clay won’t be able to flow properly throughout it.

The hole is maybe 3cm (30mm). 20% of 30 is 6, 6 - 30 = 24mm. 20% is a high guess, so it may end up being a perfect size. If a different bird ends up using it, it’ll probably still be a tit/tit-like bird.

And as you can tell, the printer messed up the handle quite a bit. It was probably a cooling error—the heated plastic hadn’t cooled down by the time the printing nozzle came back to slap more hot plastic onto it, so it crumbled a bit. A similar thing happened to the bottom, but I’m not sure why. Maybe the same issue, but it wasn’t as small a surface.

It wasn’t a big deal—I can just fill in with clay, though the surface won’t be quite as perfect, but along with everything else going into the design it won’t be noticeable.

I cleaned up the supports as much as I could before I was kicked out the studio. Luckily the maker’s floor has pliers, so I cleaned it best I could before going to the ceramics studio to make a mold from it.

This is a quite different mold than what I made before. My very first mold was a two-piece mold with an object which already had seam lines—this one was a much more complicated shape, and used a cylindrical shape. At this point I was convinced I could do it in only three pieces by following the curves of the piece and same time making four pieces.

Since it’s not a finished product/design I didn’t mind if it was very, very messy like it is, but I should probably do things the harder way next time (four pieces instead of three) because in order for me to take the print out, a big chunk of plaster broke off. Luckily, it’s still usable, but I’ll need to seal the gaps with clay. It’s a pet peeve of mine to see people do that—why not just make a good mold in the first place?—but now I’m the one doing it.

So now I have to wait until at least the weekend to actually pour it, ideally until Wednesday, but I’ll probably start Tuesday. Until then I have to think about how to assemble the rest of the pieces of this design, and I’ll have to make another post about it because there are so many ideas and issues I need to gather at once.