Instant Mold! No, not a way to ensure your cheese goes off the day you purchase it, instead it is an “interesting” product that allows you to make molds of things (hey, like miniatures!).
Instant Mold comes in a pack with 6 translucent sticks of a special material. The sticks becomes malleable when placed in hot water and thus soften and can be wrapped around items thus producing an instant mold, hence the name. It can be cut with a scalpel to free the molded item and it can be re-used again and again simply by putting the molding back in some hot water. Watch the Instant Mold video below, to see the stuff in action, but before buying remember to come back and read the rest of the article for what you don’t know about this “product”…
Now your impressed, and ready to open your wallet for the stuff, well wait a minute! There is an alternative (or four).
These special sticks are 99.9% likely to be PCL (Polycaprolactone) which is a bio-degradeable plastic with a “melt” point of around 60 degrees C. You can get it in much larger quantities and usually in a different form (pellets). The pellets are the same stuff just an easier form to manufacture. It also has the advantage that it can be poured around an object and heated until the PCL “melts”. This stuff comes under various brands, such as “Friendly Plastic”, “InstaMorph”, “Shapelock” and in the UK “Polymorph” (Now that was a good Red-Dwarf episode)! It also comes in a variety of dyed colours which might be less useful for making molds. Let me find the stuff for you on ebay some of which can be bought for much less.
In the UK you can also order it from maplins in 150g (£5.99) ,250g (£9.99) & 500g (£17.99) quantities.
