How to make a silicone mould for casting yourself at home?

Selection silicone moulds on the market is large, and some shapes are also available in our shop. However, how do you deal with a project that involves making an unusual casting? When you want to make a decoration for your home or garden in a shape that no available ready-made mould in the shop will allow you to achieve? We can, of course, make such a mould ourselves at home.

What will we need to make a DIY silicone mould?

To make DIY silicone moulds, we will of course need silicone. There are two types of moulding silicone available in our shop - Two-component silicone moulding compound ADE-10 and Two-component silicone moulding compound ADE-31. The main difference between the two is in hardness, as reflected by the numbers in their names - ADE-10 has a hardness of shore 10 and ADE-31 a hardness of shore 31. They also differ in demoulding time (24 hours for ADE-10 and 2 hours for ADE-31), tear strength (4.1 MPa and 4.6 MPa respectively) and viscosity of the mixture (2600 mPa.s for ADE-10 and 2800 mPa.s for ADE-31). Both silicones are very fluid.

An alternative to specialised moulding silicones is silicone available from the builders' merchants, which is combined with potato starch at a ratio of 1:1.5 (one measure of silicone and one and a half measures of potato paste). The mass thus created is thick and malleable, so it can be used for hand-gluing the shape of the silicone mould, which cannot be achieved with funnel moulding silicone. However, the DIY moulds obtained in this way will be characterised by much poorer performance - they will be less durable in the first place.

In addition to the main product, silicone, we will also need a template - a jar, vase, casket or other object whose shape we want to obtain for the mould and then the casting. If we want to make a silicone mould for texture, we will also need a suitable template - for example, a piece of lace fabric with which to imprint the lace pattern.

It will also be useful to have some painter's foil or a pad to work on without worrying about splashing your desk or table. You will also need an extra container in which to put the template - choose something you no longer need or will only use for making other DIY silicone moulds. It's also a good idea to have a wallpaper cutter on hand.

DIY silicone mould step by step

To make the DIY silicone mould, let's prepare the paste - mixing the two ingredients of the silicone moulder or silicone with potato starch. Once you have a homogeneous mass, prepare the mold - place it in a larger container so that you can pour the silicone around the mold. To make the jar, place it in a larger (e.g. plastic) container and fill the space between the container and the jar with silicone. Leave the whole thing for 2 hours in the case of silicone ADE-31 or for 24 hours in the case of silicone ADE-10 or silicone mixed with starch.

After waiting a certain amount of time, we proceed to remove the mould from the packaging in which it was poured and the template from the silicone mould. To do this, we may have to make delicate incisions with a wallpaper knife - do this at the point where we are going to fill the mould with polymer plaster, and preferably try to get the template out without cutting the silicone.

Making a silicone mould ourselves allows us to make the casting we want. This allows us to enrich our studio with more interesting projects or simply to develop our DIY creativity. Moreover, we can use these moulds for casts not only of plaster, but also of various types of resin or wax. We would like to invite you to our shop with the highest quality polymeric gypsum.

Shutterstock photo.