I love Erneast Haeckel in fact the lower middle on I have been toying with making for years. I was going to use recycled knife blades from thrift stores.

Here’s what I know about plastic.

In sheet form

Plexiglass in a sheet can be cut and routed with a CNC. It can be slumped with a large flat heat source. It is not glued it is chemically bonded.

Here is the glue name

Weld-on

Place #3 in joint and let dry then fill in the seams with #16

www.rplastics.com/plac.html


In a scuptural form the only thing I know is this stuff but I have had people tell me it doesn’t work very well.

shapelock.com/

In a liquid you can cast for you can use Enrirotech casting resin.

www.djhobby.com/cgi-bin/indexpage.pl


I think I might need to know more about your process to understand what your material needs are.

Depending on what you are trying to do you might be able to use a another material and then coat it with plastic.

Good luck,

Janine

Really complex shapes like that are tough - my first thought it so make them out of clay, then do a mold and make copies out of resin. Tap has the stuff for this.

Another would be to model it on a computer and have someone with a computer operated milling machine cut it out for you.

For some of them with lots of repeated shapes you could cut them out and glue together. One way to cut them would be to do it like they did the big sculptures near center camp this year - find a long extrusion with the profile you want and cut slices. For example, from a round tube you can get a bunch of circles, or ovals if you cut at an angle.

How big did you want them to be? Do they need to be clear? Acrylic is cheap and available but it's prone to cracking. Polycarbonate is a little tougher to work with but much stronger if you want clear. HDPE and UHMW are easy to machine and very tough.

Ok. I finally decided on a process: I'll sculpt it in pieces out of (sculpey? shapelock? something else? still iffy here) and create a flexible mold. I'm completely confident in my ability to cast this.

I've also decided on material for the Haeckel thing: I'm about to purchase trial sizes of silicone in a variety of hardnesses from smooth-on.com

My problem comes at what material to actually make the mold out of. Silicone sticks to silicone, so making the mold out of flexible silicone rubber seems problematic. Urethane apparently inhibits silicone from curing? I'm still unclear how much. If so, a flexible urethane rubber seems like it could be trouble too. (And of course I a want flexible material so I can have the liberty to make complex shapes with overhangs, etc.)

So, um, I'm stuck at this point. I could purchase trial sizes of the materials in question and test, but that will be spendy. I can simply seal the mold well with petroleum jelly or a spray-on sealing agent, but I'm afraid that will change the texture of the finished silicone product. And it sucks that Douglas & Sturgess is only open when I'm at work M-F, though I can call and ask over my lunch break I'm sure...

But maybe I can also pose the question here: any suggestions?