Crowtalker - Molding and Casting Your Way to Riches

MOLDING AND CASTING YOUR WAY TO RICHES

Copyright 2013 by Desert Publishing

All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

By CrowTalker

Published by Desert Publishing, P.O. Box 1766, Snowflake, Arizona, 85937 USA

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION TO MOLDING AND CASTING

Mold making is not nearly as difficult as you might think. Making molds and what materials to make them from is determined by what object is going to be cast and out of what material the item is going to be cast out of.

There are basically two types of molds with some crossover characteristics between them. There are flexible molds and rigid molds respectively. Some mold materials offer a rigid type molding capability that are semi-flexible, enough flexibility to allow for the release of the cast object from the mold.

Some molded items require the making and use of both a flexible mold and a rigid mold to produce the finished product. Case in point, a piece of cast gold or silver jewelry or even a statue are made using what is called a lost wax casting. In lost wax casting, the wax is either coated onto or injected into a flexible rubber mold. The cooled wax parts are removed from the rubber mold and then they are either coated with a fireproof coating called a shell mold or cast in a solid block of fireproof material. The fireproof mold is then dried very well and then placed in an oven to melt and burn out the wax objects and to drive any moisture out of the mold material that might cause the creation of steam that will ruin the castings. While the molds are still hot, molten metal is cast into them filling the void that was left by the melted out wax. Once the metal has cooled, it is removed from the fireproof material and trimmed, cleaned, polished, and finished to create the final product. In the case of most large statues, the cast pieces are welded together to create the entire item and finished to make it look as if it were one solid casting, except that it would actually be hollow inside.

Metal casting is expensive, difficult and dirty work, and unless you are already set up for it and are well experienced at it, I would suggest not approaching metal casting at all as a start up business.

One exception to this is using very low temperature melt metals which can be cast in silicone molds. Examples of this would be tin soldiers or pewter jewelry and some other small metal items.

The other chapters in this book will introduce you to a wide variety of materials and molding information that will give the reader a good understanding of the general techniques of working with any material you can think of.

Even if you are not interested in a particular material to work with, you may still want to read that chapter so you understand how some of them work. At least in this way you become familiar with the properties of the materials and can then associate those same properties with other molding processes.

WHY CHOOSE MANUFACTURING AS A HOME BUSINESS

The reasons are unlimited as to why a person may choose manufacturing a physical product as a home business. Even before the Internet there were tons of people trying to run scams on the general public by sending out paper newsletters and putting ads in the papers about how you can make a fortune making products by so called work at home companies. The scams usually work like this: For a price, you would send the company money for a kit (usually some kind of little pieces of wood and other minor materials that were way over priced) and require you to cut out miniature parts to make doll furniture and so forth using your own Xacto knives and other tools and then assemble them with glue to make a complete item. The little parts had to be made perfect for the company to accept them and pay you for the little items. The pay would be a whopping $5 or something like that for each item they accepted.

I actually helped a friend of mine with one of those projects where he was supposed to make a miniature jewelry box lined with fine felt with a little drawer and all. Well, after trying to make the little box, the real frustration kicked in for him as he spend from two to three hours just trying to cut out the little box parts with the Xacto knife. The company gave all the dimensions to make the parts which two of them were wrong to begin with. Since we had a laser cutter that could cut the parts out fast and accurately, we programmed up the cut files and made the adjustments to sizes as on screen, we could lay them all out. We made all the cuts of the parts and he took them home and started trying to glue them all together. Even using a toothpick he could not get a clean glue line on the parts to make a nice looking box. The other issues with the item was trying to hold the extremely small parts together for assembly and keep them straight. It was a logistic nightmare. It was obvious right away that it was going to take some elaborate miniature jigs to be able to make the assembly. As it were, the small assemblies were never even attempted to be made and sent to the company. It was all a scam as the company knew from the get go that there was no way a person could make these things, especially with crude hand cutting tools and no jigs to work with. Even with all the modern equipment that could be used to make them, the labor alone would be far less than minimum wage.

This guy was a watch repair person during his younger years, so working with miniature items was nothing new to him. The reality came home when he realize that it was all a scam to begin with.

Personally, I think these scams only serve the purpose of frustrating people to the point that they never actually build a home based industry or attempt to do it because of similar experiences.

A legitimate home assembly business would have a difficult time trying to recruit people just because of the negative experiences they had or had experienced second hand by knowing others that had tried.

So using this real life example as a precaution in researching doing a home based business, try and build your own manufacturing business from the ground up and not rely on others to give you a job that you may never actually see a profit from.

Also, don't rely on other businesses as your main marketing methods either. We had built up a very sizable business after spending well over a thousand hours just in building automated listings to use on a famous internet auction company to only have them shut down the software they provided and put us out of business in one day. The support of the business we had built up including the large industrial building, part time workers coming in all hours of the day and night, materials purchased for the jobs, and equipment invested into were all pretty much gone when the money stopped coming in from the lack of being able to use the listing software alone. It took over two years to recover and start again from scratch using our own marketing via our own web site to get sales up to the level again where we could move back into a shop and get part time workers coming in again to help do the manufacturing.

Just so you realize, there just isn't enough time in the day for a single person to run most manufacturing businesses by themselves and expect to do anything else in life. So planning for growth is very important.

The molding and casting business is ideal for building a business that a single person or just a couple of part time workers can become successful at. The reason for this is that you can grow the business a lot almost overnight just by increasing the amount of production molds being used to make parts. It only takes a few minutes more to fill a hundred molds over filling ten. Then once the cycle is figured out, you can fill two hundred molds just as fast as you would use the materials curing time to fill the next cycle and strip the first sets done and make ready for the next cycle. The amount of molds that can be filled at one time will pretty much be based on the casting materials gel time, or set time. For instance, if plaster was the material being used for the casting material, it sets up in around 20 minutes so you would not be able to mix up a batch to pour into the molds that takes that long to accomplish. You could break up the mix and pour times and volume to accomplish the same task though. In other words, you could pour 25 molds, mix up another batch and pour the next 25 molds and so on and keep doing that until the first set are cured enough to strip from the molds. Any secondary work needed like trimming and finishing could be done in this time frame too.