Learn me- Acrylic casting

Since you lot know everything else, I'm going to go ahead and ask here. I have.... an idea. Basically I want to make a shift knob, or several. I have a feeling the unique style of what I have in mind might allow me to sell a couple of these to local car people, both hot rod and otherwise. I have 0 intention of actually cutting a huge profit on these, if I ever make more than one. BUT- here's the scenario.

I want to take an item with multiple angular surfaces both flat and curved, and sink it in clear acrylic. For those from the southwest, think the clear acrylic balls and whatnot that have spiders and snakes and stuff in them, but different designs. I have an idea of the materials I want to use, seems that getting clear acrylic resin stuff is pretty easy, as McMaster-Carr and Smoothon have it. The real question is, how to avoid bubbles? My thought is to "paint" several layers on the item in question, to get as much of the deeper areas filled in as possible, and then sink that piece into a mold that approximates the final shape of what i want, and polish/cut down from there. Am I off base with this?

On that sort of item, there is often a vacuum applied during the molding process to eliminate bubbles.

Yeah, I thought about that, but i'm not real sure how to apply a vaccuum in this case, and I'm pretty sure SWMBO would be torqued if I gummed up the Dyson with acrylic.

vibration to remove bubbles
http://ultrawerke.blogspot.com/2007/03/resin-casting-tutorial-part-iv.html

JoeyM wrote: vibration to remove bubbles http://ultrawerke.blogspot.com/2007/03/resin-casting-tutorial-part-iv.html

SWEET. This does a lot for me. I knew this place would hook me up.

2-part RTV silicone for molds, water-clear casting resin, and a small vacuum pump that will pull maybe 15". The "vacuum chamber can be a length of big PVC pipe w/ a cap on one end and a clean-out fitting on the other.

It's easy, but much, much easier with the right tools.