My costume for Connecticon requires that I make some really sturdy, metallic looking hand accessories. I’ll just tell you now, I’m Cosplaying as X-23 from the X-men, and I need to make four adamantium claws. I decided to try my hand at resin casting, because my Boyfriend made a sword with resin with AMAZING results. I thought, claws are a lot smaller, so they’ll be a lot easier, right?
We started with four pine wood stakes. My boyfriend sanded them into rough claw shapes with his fancy dremel, then left me to do the casting myself. The idea was to coat the wooden claws in a thick layer of resin, and then re-sand them down to a perfectly smooth, non-pourous paintable surface, capable of obtaining a high-gloss finish. I choose Polyester resin, because it was conveniently located at A.C. Moore. I thought, if it’s in a craft store, it must be more user friendly than the versions at a hardware store, right? Not so.
Boyfriend and I with beautifully crafted resin sword
Before I began my casting, I got a book from the Library, “Casting for Crafters” which give detailed instructions on a number of casting methods and projects. This is an excellent book, and I would recommend it to anything who is thinking about casting in Polyester or Epoxy resin.
This book informed me that my Polyester resin, while very beautiful and bubble free, is very toxic and gives off some pretty nasty fumes. So I decided that I needed to take some extra precautions, but I wasn’t going to let the word “fumes” scare me away from the project all together. I am after all a painter, and Gamsol gives off some pretty strong vapors and I survived those just fine.
So I set up my work area outside, with pre-measures cups and mixing sticks and my wax paper. I laid out my claws, put on my mask, goggles, and gloves, and pried open the resin container.
What a smell. I felt like my mask did nothing to filter out the mind-spinning vapors. I mixed and poured my resin rather quickly, taking frequent breaths of air several feet away from my project. It was incredibly messy. The top of the resin container was not meant for pouring, it seems, and resin spilled all over the side of the can. This just created more fumes. By the time I had everything under control I felt sick.
The labels on the container are down-right scary. This stuff causes blindness, can stop your breathing, if you ingest it you’re pretty much dead, and too much exposure can cause depression of the nervous system. Did I also mention that it can burn you from coming in contact with your skin? Honestly, if the pour was simple and easy to control, I wouldn’t have that much of a problem with the scary warning labels. It’s the fact that the stuff is so messy that scares me. You don’t know what the resin is going to get on. There could be poison on any surface! I am a very neat and orderly individual, and I feel like I took every reasonable precaution to get my materials all organized and ready to go before I began the casting. But still, I felt like I was making too much of a mess to make playing with deadly liquid plastic worth it.
I don’t know how the claws have come out yet; they aren’t fully cured. I’m sure that they will look fine because resin really does look awesome.
I don’t know either if I will attempt casting again. It would be a shame to waste all the supplies I got together. I wanted to make all sorts of things. But what is more important? Putting dead flowers inside a glass paperweight, or keeping my braincells? We’ll see how my claws come out.
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