Another cheat post, because I started those last week as well.
I want to redecorate the front yard and therefore ordered some very cool latex moulds. I still have plenty of pouring concrete left from the renovations, so I can probably breed a lot of them.
Here’s the first, not so good attempts:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
My attempts in supporting the moulds weren’t as successful as I thought they would be. The wings on this were supposed to be upright, which isn’t a big issue, but I also made my concrete too wet*, so when I tried to demould it after the recommended 5 days, it was still too wet and the tips of the wings broke off.
Next one:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
I left that one for a few more days to dry, which worked out well, but… the weight of the concrete pushed the head down.
For my next attempts I buried the moulds in damp earth. I’ll have to get myself some regular sand for the next ones, but I hope that this time they wont be flat.
Last one is a cute little croc, only that I broke off its tail, but that was easily fixed with some glue.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
*As my dad said: It’s too dry, too dry, too dry right until it’s too wet.
Dragons! I like them, I imagine these ones peeping out from within some greenery while the later examles bask proudly in the sun.
A good way to support molds for concrete is a box of sand. It’s a pain getting the sand in and out (lots of scooping) but it can’t be beat for casting. Also, you can use pearlite which is more expensive but easier to move around. By the way you can also cast pearlite in your cement and have very light castings.
A neighbor in baltimore had lawn gnomes that kept getting vanished, so they resorted to long pieces of rebar epoxied up inside the gnome and hammered deep into the ground. That was all well and good until a drunk drove across the lawn and wound up with tires speared on rebar.
Marcus
I buried the second batch in dirt from the garden.
Current plan is to build a “tower” out of planting stones and put the dragons onto them.
Those look interesting, I hope you get successful cast out of it.
You can make cement more fluid by adding a teaspoon of dishwashing detergent per bucket. It flows better even when using less water, works a real treat just like commercial plasticisers.
Also you can make it harden real fast by adding liquid glass (an aqueous solution of natrium silicate). But I would onlyrecommend that once you really know your process, because it can harden real fast, as in plaster of paris fast.
Thanks for the dishwasher tip. I actually use calcium sulphate screed (a word I didn’t know in English until today). We have a lot of it left over from renovation. We ordered lots of material from a big online hardware supplier (we did try to get it locally. After Mr almost murdered people who’d sent us to a store 30km away, with two cars, just to find out that no, it wasn’t what we actually needed in spite of having told them exactly what we needed, we went online…), including all the screed needed for the “Lego Room” in the cellar. During renovations we used half the screed for the upstairs bathroom and then found out that we could save some cm in height by using ready made screed plates. Which leaves me with about 400kg of unused screed…
I see a lot of dragons in your future …
The dragon in picture #2 looks textured enough that you could probably plant chia seeds on it. I’m just sayin’…