Howdy fellow Hobby Heroes. I’m just throwing up a quick article to show how easy it is to cast your own bases if you have the right equipment. When I was putting my Wild West Exodus Posse together, I determined that I wanted to do something more with the basing than just sand and grass. Therefore, I purchased the WWX Town Base Insert Sprue from Outlaw Miniatures and decided to use those. I knew I was going to need more base inserts than I wanted to spend, so I decided to try my hand at casting. I am lucky in the fact that Joe has done some casting in the past so I had him to bounce questions off of.
Here are the bases I am going to cast and to do that, I am using some Instant Mold to make my molds. I picked Instant Mold up a couple years ago at Adepticon and it is truly an amazing product. What you do is pop it in some hot water and it becomes very malleable and all you do is press it around the item that you want to duplicate. Let it cool down to room temp, then pop the item out of the mold. Now the molds are ready for the resin. As a bonus, once you are done with the molds, you can put it back into some hot water and they are good to go again for your next project. I’m telling you, this is one of the best hobby tools I have found, and is well worth the investment.
Next you need the casting material. I am using Alumilite’s AlumiRes. I believe it runs about $35, but you get a ton of it to do future projects with, and I was able to use the Hobby Lobby 40% off coupon to get it much cheaper. Then you just need a cup to mix the resin, and something to stir it. I went the simple route and picked up some Dixie cups and Popsicle sticks. Makes clean up easy because you just throw it away when you are done. All you need to do at this point is mix a 50/50 mix of the AlumiRes and give it a good stir. Carefully pour the mix into the molds, and give them about 15 mins to sit and harden up.
After it has hardened, carefully pry the resin out of the mold and Shazaam you have your base. Now, just carefully clean them up with either a file or a hobby knife. WARNING: this is resin, and when you clean it, you need to avoid breathing it in. Go to your local hardware store and you can buy a cheap painters mask and that will do the trick. Now they are ready for priming and painting. Below are a few that I have painted up as examples.
Good luck everyone. Hope some of you can get something out of this. I thoroughly enjoyed pushing myself to do something new, and will continue to use this podcast and blog to try new tricks and techniques to advance my hobby. If you got any questions or suggestions, hit me up at ryan@hobbyheroes.com.
Be Excellent to Each Other,
Ryan G
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