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Mine wife got me a couple of Hurst Arts Custom Molds for Christmas and fifty pound box of Merlin's Magic dental plaster. I finally this weekend got rid of my holiday house guests and had all my accouterments ready to try plastic molding.

So yesterday I finally got set up, on our dining room table of all places, it's just been brutally cold here so the garage was out and I didn't want to use our gaming table and didn't want to set up another table as a considerable portion of the house is still carpeted and I imagine plaster spilled on carpet is probably a bad idea so the dining room was confiscated. I'm using Merlin's Magic as the plaster; it was the most recommended in terms of being user friendly while still being crazy strong.

I'd cleaned my plastic molds and sprit zed those with 'wet water' and now poured them, actually Laura and I both poured. I poured multiple times and ended up with the scraping method being preferable right now. I also scraped within a couple of minutes of pouring for best results after trial and error. Waiting the recommended six minutes resulted in the plaster being too set to scrape easily.

I also tried the 'glass' method where you take a piece of glass and lay it down on the custom molds starting at one edge to squeeze the excess plaster out. Unfortunately I had issues with air bubbles and weighting and all that.

Realistically I could make probably 3 runs an hour if I wanted to really push it and with my current set up time perhaps 4 maybe 5 molds at one time. Of course a lot of this is sit and wait time so if you had a lot of molds you could certainly be busy all the time with weighing plaster and water, scraping, etc.

All in all the process was pretty simple, a few bits of trial and error as temperature of ambient, custom molds, water and the color of plaster and the humidity all have an effect on your plaster and dictate the times needed to wait to scrape off the excess plaster. So if you have some time to spare and the cash to outlay and of course the interest then these molds and techniques might be something to consider raising the bar at your table.