Thread: My new casting bed

I already have a pressure pot for casting, but have previously used conduit or channel to cast blanks. I want to cast some worthless wood blanks from some Conkerberry and Budgeroo root I have, so thought itwas about time I made a half decent bed.

The base of a standard bucket is pretty much the right diameter for the base of my pressure pot, so I basically started with timber blanks, then hot melt glued them to the bottom of the bucket. I used standard width blanks, but oversized height, to allow overfill of resin. I managed to get 4 full sized blanks and 3 Sierra sized blanks into the bucket.

After oiling the blanks and bucket with spray olive oil, I then just used silicon tubes from the hardware to fill in the gaps, then overfilled over the lot to around 10mm before levelling off with a spatula. It took 3 tubes of the cheapest stuff I could find and I then left it for a week. By bending the bucket and giving it a tap, the silicon cake just fell out. I had a few holes in the silicon from where I had tried to push the silicon down between the blanks , instead of pumping it between them through the nozzle, so I used some white bathroom silicon I had to fill them up .

After a few more days I then pulled the timber blanks out and added a few wire handles to lower the bed into the bucket. Should work a treat, not bad for $12 outlay

Cheers