Royce
Member
I need some advice. Here's what I did...
I printed out a pattern on "water-slide" decal paper. Cut the decal to size to wrap around the pen tubes. All good so far. Plugged the ends of the tubes and put the now decal wrapped pen tubes in my silicone pen casting molds and cast them using Alumilite. Again, so far so good. Everything came out looking good.
The first couple, when I attempted to square up the ends of my now cured castings using a pen mill, I got a "catch" and the clear casting appeared to "flex" enough to pull the casting resin away from the decal leaving a "cloudy" look. No problem. The next ones I carefully squared up the ends using a disk sander. Again, so far so good.
Next, when I mounted the pen tube blanks on my pen mandrel and apply just a bit of pressure to snug them up, the pen bushings appear to again cause just a bit of "flex" in the Alumilite casting to cause it to pull away from the pen tube.
In a nutshell, the casting doesn't appear to adhere securely enough to the water-slide decal to really "stick".
Any thoughts on how to make this work? Thanks.
I printed out a pattern on "water-slide" decal paper. Cut the decal to size to wrap around the pen tubes. All good so far. Plugged the ends of the tubes and put the now decal wrapped pen tubes in my silicone pen casting molds and cast them using Alumilite. Again, so far so good. Everything came out looking good.
The first couple, when I attempted to square up the ends of my now cured castings using a pen mill, I got a "catch" and the clear casting appeared to "flex" enough to pull the casting resin away from the decal leaving a "cloudy" look. No problem. The next ones I carefully squared up the ends using a disk sander. Again, so far so good.
Next, when I mounted the pen tube blanks on my pen mandrel and apply just a bit of pressure to snug them up, the pen bushings appear to again cause just a bit of "flex" in the Alumilite casting to cause it to pull away from the pen tube.
In a nutshell, the casting doesn't appear to adhere securely enough to the water-slide decal to really "stick".
Any thoughts on how to make this work? Thanks.
