Making jewelry molds

Making jewelry molds
So once you have your piece of jewelry cast or fabricated, whichever form you’re using to create your piece, you have it nice and clean. You want to have it super clean, exactly how you want to see it every time. And I want to show you how we reproduce pieces in the jewelry world. You would basically take a vulcanizer, and I do all this in house for other people as well. And my pieces I do make a mold of all my pieces incase something happens to them. You would take your heated press, is basically what this is, and turn it to whichever degree it depends on which ever kind of mold rubber that you’re using. You would then take your mold rubber, which comes in sheets like this, it also comes in putty form. Different types of wax, I mean I’m sorry, different types of rubber for different types of jobs. You then would layer different pieces of rubber inside of a mold frame which is an aluminum frame with a cut out area for your mold. You would layer as many sheets as it takes, you want your piece to be right in the center of that. So you then would take your finished piece of jewelry, gold or silver, whatever it is you’re working with, and insert it inside the middle and then layer on top of that more of the sheet rubber. You would then take, once you have it nice packed in really tight, you would take that and put it in between two aluminum plates, and insert it in your vulcanizer or your heated press. Pretty simple technique, it’s a good way tot reproduce your piece that you’re happy with or want to create more than one. You would then press it down until it’s tight, you don’t want to over tighten it. This is basically heating your rubber to where it melts together and forms around the piece of jewelry that you’re trying to reproduce. It usually takes, depending on how many layers or inches of thickness that you have, forty five minutes to an hour to create a mold. You then cut it open with an exacto blade, putting locks so it locks together nicely, open that up and then you basically have your negative form to reproduce your piece!