Blue Stuff and Milliput

[Fabricator General]

After watching some videos on YouTube, I picked up some Blue Stuff and Milliput from Green Stuff World. I've decided to try it for the first time on trying to copy a Heavy Bolter from a Long Fang rather than buying a whole new box for just one weapon.

Blue Stuff is a reusable molding material that you put in hot water and then press around the pieces you want to copy.  

After making both sides of the mold you fill it with either green stuff or milliput. I'd never used Milliput before and I'd heard that it was cheaper than green stuff and easier to work with, so I've decided to just jump in with both feet. 

There are seven pieces I have to make, and they range from large to small, and relatively simple to challengingly detailed. You can see the first mold that I tried above. The blue stuff is pretty intuitive to use for really simple tasks. But it does require some more attention and extra work to make sure all the detail is sharp on more detailed pieces. I've already chopped up that mold in order to reuse it.

[Fabricator General]

I cut the blue stuff into smaller pieces so that it will soften quicker in the hot water.  The balancing act that you're working with is: The hotter the water, the more flowing and melty the blue stuff becomes and you can get better detail from the mold . But the more melty the blue stuff is, the hotter it is to handle .

After I thought the blue stuff was soft enough, I fished the pieces out of the water and kneaded them into disk. Then pushed several of the pieces into the disk.

Then I used the handle of a brush to create little holes that will create lugs or pegs that will allow easy alignment of the two halves later on. Then I set this aside to cool while I worked on the other half of the mold.

I heated up more blue stuff and pressed it onto the first mold. Again I pressed the stuff into the components really hard to make sure it got into all of the detail. The quality of the detail I'm going to get is completely dependent on how thoroughly I work with it while it is hot.

After allowing the mold to cool and set completely. I very carefully pried the two halves apart with my fingers. The two blobs (mold halves) of blue stuff don't merge into each other but when you first pull them apart they are pretty firmly stuck together. So I don't use any tools to avoid digging into, or damaging the mold.

[Fabricator General]

Now it is time to mix up some Milliput. It is a two-part putty that can be used to repair leaks and can be cut, sanded and sculpted after it cures. The main difference is that green stuff holds finer detail but is more expensive than milliput.

Milliput is really sticky to work with, so its best to keep your knife and your fingers wet when handling it. But you also have to be careful that it doesn't get too wet.
Green stuff can handle all the water you want to throw at it, but Milliput is more like clay if it gets too wet it will start to dissolve into a fine mud.

I cut two equal quantities from each log of putty and mixed them together with my fingers. Once the putty was ready, I pressed into it into molds on both sides.

(This looks scruffy and nasty because I pressed these together before I realized I forgot to take the pic for you. D'oh!)
Taking care to line up the mold halves correctly, using the lugs I made with the brush handle, I pressed the mold together and set it aside, with something heavy on top of it, to let it cure overnight.

[Spectre Senence]

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing

[Fabricator General]

Thanks, I thought it might be interesting for anybody else that has been curious about working with this stuff.

With the mold opened you can see how it came out.

Welcome to the world's biggest mold line.

After cutting the components apart and trimming them a little bit, I realized that the mold had been mis-aligned a little bit. I didn't get the lugs lined up properly which was most likely caused by loading too much putty into the gaps. 

My plan had been to press the molds together hard enough to press the excess out of the way, but that didn't work. The putty was too thick to be pressed out in the way I expected. I'll try again with smaller amounts.

The flawed pieces will make good practice for getting used to cutting and filing this stuff. After all, it won't matter if I split any of these pieces in half.

[Art]

Following with interest as well.

Looks like you started out with a real complex piece. Probably would be alot easier to do on smaller pieces.

Thinking this might be a good way to sculpt some personalized shoulder pads for my marines and them get a bunch of copies.

[Fabricator General]

Out of the batch of pieces, these are the simple pieces. The larger, more complex pieces I plan to do one at a time.
Because this is such a time-consuming process I hoped to do multiple small pieces in one run. That might be another mistake that I made: trying to do too much at once.

Oh well. It's still all about practice at this point. These pics are literally showing my first attempts at this. You get to learn from my novice mistakes at the same time that I do.

[karg]

This is awesome, keep it coming! I've thought of trying out bluestuff at some point as well. ^_^

[Spectre Wile]

And one of the positives f blue stuff is that it's reusable. So experimenting and mistakes are less costly.

[Fabricator General]

Last night I made a second attempt to cast the pieces. This time I used less milliput in the mold.

No new pics just yet as the mold is drying right now.

Some of the things I found so far.
* Keep your knife and your fingers wet, but don't dip the putty directly in the water.

* Too much water in the putty shows up as white spots in the dried putty and seems to make it more brittle.

* When the pieces come out of the mold, they are set but have a combination of flexibility and crumbling that makes working with it challenging and a little annoying.

* After letting the pieces dry for at least 24 hours _after_ taking them out of the mold, the pieces are even more set, and the crumbling problem seems to have gone away.

* One package of Blue Stuff seems to be too little to accomplish much. Some forum posts I've read have mentioned that 2 packs are the minimum that they work with in order to make good results.

* This is a long, time-consuming process. This is not a way to just bang out a quick copy of a piece that you need.

* The quality of the final part is dependent on how much practice you have in working the molds, and how much skill and patience you have with knife and file cleaning up the piece afterwards.

[Fabricator General]

Okay, on the one month anniversary of my last post I finally have enough time to be able to give a quick update.
The difference between the two attempts was amazing.

The texture of this batch was much easier to work with. Apparently the texture problems I mentioned before was caused by the excess water I mentioned previously.

The pieces had a flexibility that allowed me to pare away the excess material much more easily, and with less risk to the bits than in my first attempt.

This flexibility was after the 24 hour out-of-the-mold curing/drying period. The pieces have pretty good fidelity to the original parts.

There is still the need to cut and file to get the parts to a good usable state, but once that's done they fit together pretty well.

[Fabricator General]

The pieces fit pretty well but they are not perfect. I'd give it probably 80-90% match. It will be interesting to see what a complete assembly will look like.

This sculptor vaseline came as a mispack or free gift with my order. On a whim I put a little on my fingers while kneading the milliput and it made it much easier to handle and dealt with the stickiness problem. So thumbs up for that. I also put a thin coat on the mold halves for a mold-release agent. I'm less sure how much of an impact that had, but the pieces came out really easily.

[Fabricator General]

I finally have all of the pieces cast. Overall, I'd say that they are still in the 80-90% match.

I think most of the variance comes from needing more practice with the the blue stuff. In some cases I just didn't bother to put in the time and effort to cut and file the pieces all the way to a finished state.

[Spectre Senence]

Yeah, looks like some trimming and it gets the job done. Be interesting to see it on a model and compare. Perhaps after paint too

[Fabricator General]

Here are some pics of the pieces. This is the heavy bolter that was used in the mold and the results side by side.

You can see how the 80-90% variance in the parts build up making it look less and less like the original. The parts have more thickness than the original. I think that comes from lack of practice, maybe from over-packing the milliput into the mold. I did get a little bit better at that but still need more practice.

You can also see that the lines are softer and less crisp. That's too be expected because the putty isn't high detail injected plastic. But the wobbly lines may also be from me packing the mold with material to forcefully. I was trying to get the milliput into all the crevices of the mold to avoid having holes in the piece. But because I loaded as hard as I did, it distorted the sides of the mold and distorted the sides.

It still came out okay. I'd be willing to put this "first draft" on the table and use it in a game. I think this method and material is good for making a component here and there but not for trying to replicate large, multi piece assemblies.

I originally decided to do this because I didn't want to have to buy a whole box of marines just to get the one heavy bolter that I needed. And I think it was worth it as far as that goes, but it definitely isn't any sort of shortcut to molding an army of savings.