Post #793300 by swizzle on Wed, Feb 20, 2019 2:54 AM

On 2019-02-19 20:42, kevincrossman wrote:
Keith, could you expound on the resculpts statement? I'm not sure I follow.

They pour a mug and resculpt that, and by resculpt that means adding back detail that is lost as the mold wears or changing the shape, and then making a new mold from that. That is far easier to do compared with starting a brand new sculpt of the same thing because you already have the image/shape there, you just have to fine tune it.

Now clay shrinks as it dries, figures vary depending on the type of clay, but usually you hear up to about 10%, so because the resculpt is done from a mug that was poured from one mold and then a new mold is made from that, the mugs poured from the new mold will be about 10% smaller than the previous mold.

I hope i explained that clearly. It's kinda like making a copy of a copy of a copy of something but instead of the quality decreasing, with clay its getting smaller.

And clay is acidic so it wears away the plaster after a while. You can usually get 30 or so mugs from a mold before you start having to carve the detail back into each mug as it comes out of the mold. Guys like Tiki Diablo and Eekum Bookum, who make mugs in runs of 300, will make about 10 molds or more of one particular design. This not only makes things faster because you pour 30 times (30 pours x 10 molds = 300 mugs) instead of 300 times, you are at that 30 number where the mold starts losing detail so you are not spending time recarving each mug.

I'd love to know how many molds they make when mugs are made in China in there 1000's, but that's the perfect example of how you can compare the same mug from when its first released to the same design a few months later after a few thousand have been made and you'll see the older mug is a lot more 'crisp' in regards to the fine details.