Undersuit
so after seeing
Bulbxsaur 's silicone undersuit I thought "I can try that! I have a 3D printer" and so I bought the
3D model of the mold and adapted it to fit me using blender. This was by far the easiest part since I am a 3D modeller by profession. This gave me this very funny side-by-side:
Guess I'm kinda thicc compared to the standard male spartan.
I found out later that I could have made this on the smaller side because it turned out a bit lose in places and the silicone is plenty stretchy.
Next I cut the model up into pieces small enough for my printer, printed them and glued the pieces together. To hold the two sides of the mold together I used duct tape, this also helped as an extra layer to avoid leaking. Which was already bad enough:
I used 180g of
dragon skin 10 fast silicone and I don't think it was enough or it wasn't spread out evenly enough, you'll see why later. I definitely recommend using the "fast" silicone because you won't need to turn your mold around for an hour. Also
pour in small batches. You won't see any sort of seams: silicone adheres to itself so you can have a layer cure for a day or more if you'd like and continue later.
I attempted to spread the silicone all around the mold in one go which caused these "stalagtites" because the silicone started leaking down. I recomment doing smaller batches ald only spreading it over a smalish area so you don't have to fight gravity as much.
And here's what it looked like fresh out of the mold!
You can see there's quite a bit of flashing along the mold seams which I had filled with a 3D pen but clearly not well enough. Its easy enough to cut off but I recommend being more diligent about the seams than I was. Which brings us to the next thing I recommend you being more careful about than I was:
This is not a tear, this is a detail small enough that the thick silicone didn't quite want to run into it, creating a hole. I bought sil-poxy and patched the hole with a thicker piece of flashing that I cut off elsewhere. Here's why this happed: Every edge in the mold that stands up is going to end up thinner than any valleys in the mold because of how liquid flows. You're gonna want to keep moving the mold as the silicone cures so it gets an even thickness. I did my best at this but because I did pours as large as 200-300g at a time I often had trouble doing this properly and many part of my suit ended up too thin or too thick which led to this when I tried it on:
it tore along one of the ridges, not a seam but a bit that stands up in the mold and thus had a thinner layer of silicone. Once there's even a tiny tear silicone just
goes, it's like gelatin or something
. I am trying to see if I can still glue this but as you can see in the video the silicone also attracted a lot of dust and just looks a bit gross. I'm overall not very impressed with this whole ordeal. Its messy and I ended up with something that sure, is very comfortable and has great details and accuracy, but I worry about it tearing even more in different places.
Costs
This was
€80,- in silicone,
€21,- for mold release,
€27,- for the black dye for the silicone,
$30,- for the mold files
€40,- in 3D filament.
I also paid about €9,- shipping
I am not convinced this was worth the cost even if I did make it thicker (which would cost even more) and it wouldn't have torn...
