Having gone through many of the threads in this forum, I have found many helpful gems here.
I want a thread to share my experiences of keycap making.
I started off with a simple sculpting of a pineapple using Sculpey polymer clay. This was a lot harder than I expected since I come from an engineering background and hated art as a kid. I found some peace in working on my sculpting as it reminds me of my childhood (hopefully my future keycaps come out looking better than my childhood art projects though).
The little pineapple leafs near the top are pretty fragile and this becomes an issue during the mold making process since they broke off during demolding. For the mold making process, I purchased some OOMOO 30 from Amazon. I flattened some sculpting putty to be used as the base (prevents leaking) and used Lego blocks to build my walls. In my first run, I didn't bother adding vaseline (I use this as mold release per Booper's guide) to my pineapple keycap - this might be one of the reasons why the stems broke off.
OOMOO 30 only has a pot life of 30 minutes - not a lot of time to work with. After prepareing the OOMOO mixture, I poured it into my lego container with the keycap set right in the center. I spent about 5-10 minutes shaking the container and even used a hair clipper as a vibrator to get some air bubble out. In retrospect, I should have spent the full 30 minutes trying to get the air bubbles out.
After waiting the 3 hours, I added sprues with q-tip and elmers glue (Elmers glue did not work out too well since the molding mixture shifted it around a bit - I'll buy some super glue today). I rebuilt the lego walls so that we can now form out second part of the mold. I also added a very thin later of vaseline with my fingers to make sure that the two molds won't stick together. This time, I spent almost no time working out the bubbles. I am going to pay for this later.
This is what the final mold came out to look like. The design is barely recognizable and the stem has a huge bubble making it unusable. As previously mentioned, I am going to have to spend a lot more time working out the bubbles.
I went ahead and casted this anyway - for the practice and troubleshooting. It is still in progress, but I ran into some issue with getting the liquid resin into the sprues. I am assuming that most people use some kind of syringe to inject the resin into the mold. I'll have to figure out how to do this effectively.
Keycap #1 (Pineapple) Summary:- Avoid designs with needle-like structures for now. They are pretty difficult to work with for a first-timer. My second design is going to be a crab, much more flat.
- Spend a lot more time working out bubbles when molding. I am not sure how else to approach this outside of maybe painting a coat of the molding mixture prior to pouring (this is how Booper does it). I am already working on a second mold and I spent about 30 minutes using a hair clipper as a vibrator to touch the sides of the lego walls to massage the mixture.
- Learn how to cast correctly. How do I effectively use the sprues to get my resin into the mold? Do I fill as much of the bottom half of the mold as possible before placing the top mold on and pouring resin into the sprue?
Overall, the entire process was much more difficult than what I had imagined. I had my expectation set very high and imagined my first cast to come out flawless. Now, I'd be happy to have it coming out looking like chewed up gum.
I am taking another stab at it today. More to come. Quick preview: