New plaster

Well, I ran out of plaster on Saturday evening. Sunday was spent at Warwick Castle and Monday was mostly spent tidying the house and searching for plaster suppliers in the area, of which I found one. Tuesday I had the health visitor over to do the 18-24 month check up on my daughter (who's 20 months and impressed the health visitor by being exceedingly cute) but thankfully my wife got out of work early so I was able to get her to pick up a 25kg bag of plaster for me. She's nice like that :P

So, the new plaster...... it's interesting and behaves VERY differently to my old stonecast. From the datasheets I found on the manufacturers website it's not going to be as strong at all, however it's also significantly cheaper so if it's strong enough then it's a huge win. More importantly it was the only plaster I could get quickly as the one company in the area that sold casting plaster only sold one type. So, as I said it's qualities are very different. I mixed the first batch using the "islands" method* and it had reached the setting up/scrape stage by the time I'd poured the first mold! I quickly pushed (yes, pushed) the rest into another mold and rinsed my pot. I then mixed a second batch that was far thinner, about the consistency of milk and poured a couple of moulds with that. The second batch was then scraped after 5 mins (probably should have been 7 but I was curious) and I demoulded the pieces in the second mold from the first batch. They weren't properly set but as I didn't expect it to have cast well anyway I didn't mind. I'd say 12 of the 15 pieces came out fine which was a surprise.

I've left the rest for a little while as I want to see how the batches compare coming out at the same time. Besides, Alexandra woke up and demanded daddy's attention. If this plaster works as I expect however and is strong enough then my time scale just got a whole lot better. I lost the three days I had spare due to "real life" however I think I'll be able to cast this stuff about every 45mins or so which means I can get it all finished in the next couple of days!

Oh, the plaster is called Fine Casting Powder. Good name huh?

*Island method - essentially you take approx half the quantity of water you'd expect would fill the moulds and pour plaster in until the plaster starts to stick up out of the top of the water in little "islands". They have to be wet still and soak the water up, just not dissipate. If the plaster sticks up and doesn't soak the water then you need to add a little water. Then mix and pour. Really doesn't work with my new plaster!