Casting at home

This was sparked by a short picture essay on p103 of the new Classic Motorsports, but it ignited some lingering fumes left over from a sprint through The Last Open Road and cogitations on early race cars.

The essay was on Kip Motors casting a duplicate of the Sunbeam Tiger badge using "stiff foam" as the mold. Has anyone done their own casting of this sort? I'm thinking that there are some very cool possibilities here, and it all looks quite possible in a home garage in the pictures.

not to plug another mag, but Hot Rod did a tech article on this. I can't find it on their website, but the issue was sometime last year. they used some sort of urethane, i think.

I checked instructables.com and found this link. It looks to be the same method as Hot Rod used. It also looks to be a straight up commercial from the comapny that supplies the urethane:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Rigid-Molds-With-Fast-Cast-Urethanes/

Thanks! The Kip Motors technique used what looked like hard green foam, the gritty stuff you can reshape with your fingers. I'm almost wondering if they just pressed the old badge into it.

Ooooh! Pictures on the Kip website! http://www.kipmotor.com/Parts/Metal_castings.htm

Okay, after finding this page I really want to visit this shop. http://www.kipmotor.com/Parts/Authentic_Reproductions.htm

StreetRodder did an article on it at least 4 years ago. I'll dig through the archives and see if I have a copy of it.

http://www.kineticvehicles.com/XPrizeIntro.html

This guy made an apparently pretty simple casting to adapt a diesel engine to a toyota transmission. Pretty neat and gave me some ideas (delusions?)

So that's what Jack at Kinetic has been up to! The guy does some really interesting things.

I've used the green foam used for flower decorating to make molds for fiberglass things. It's fine grained and very easy to shape. The resin doesn't melt or dissolve it and if you use a thin coat of car wax it releases fairly clean.

It's also easy to cut complex shapes out of a hardened FG shell.

Hey he stole my answer. :omg:

Florest foam works great.