All about the Plaster
Here I will post as much as I can about the best plaster products to use in your Linka moulds. If you have any great ideas then you can contact me and I will be happy to share them on the site, also check out the blogs and forum as there may be more information on the posts
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There are a number of plasters on the market that can be used to make the model casts, all have their strengths and weaknesses and what I mean by that is there are a number of considerations
What I will say right up front is DO NOT USE Plaster of Paris like you may get from a hobby shop. its way too weak and will just frustrate you, the pieces will break and you will waste so much time it may well put you off altogether. Tuff CastAfter many months trying out lots of plaster powders and trying to get the right product to do the best job I have developed what I have called "Tuff Cast"
It is a blend of powders with the main ingredient being Herculite LX, which is a very strong engineer grade plaster and has a lot of extremely good qualities, mixed with some very strong casting powders to add even extra strength.
This is the only Plaster I sell, its a little more expensive but I do try to keep the costs as low as I can, there are many outlets for plaster so I am not trying to compete, I just wish to help fellow model makers. |
What to Use
Herculite 2 is a good all rounder, not too expensive, fairly hard, easy to mix and you have about 10 minutes to pour and level it. I have used this many times and got really god results. for the most part you will be very happy with the results. there is always a draw back though so here it is, the expansion is about 0.60% which is fine except if your using larger moulds such as the full roof plastic ones which will bow slightly due to the expansion, also if you are building a large model I think its not as precise as some of the high end products, however its a fine starting point. You can buy Herculite 2 from many places and Ebay is as good a place as any, so at the very least this is what I would recommend. Mixing get yourself a few plastic cups, put one one a scale and measure 42 grams of water and place a mark at the water level with a marker, now fill it further to 84 Grams of water and mark the level again. Now with a new cup measure 100 Grams of Herculite 2, mark the level, then a further 100 grams and mark again. you will end up with something like this. 
So as you can see from the image I have marked each cup (3 on the Herculite powder and 4 on the water) now whenever you want a perfect mix just fill each cup with the same number of parts, a rule of thumb here is that you can fill 6 Linka moulds from 1 part of water and 1 part of Powder. so in this example just fill your cups to the no 1 marker, pour the water into an empty mixing cup, then slowly pour the powder into the water and stir at the same time. now you will still have your two empty marker cups for the next batch.
If you want to fill 12 Linka moulds then just use the no 2 marker etc. |
Making Beams
Here I have used a plastic i beam which I got from a local hobby shop, then filled it with Dental SP mix, the reason is that Dental SP plaster is strong but also it does not expand very mush at all, so after a lot of experimenting I found this works best and is fairly easy to extract from the plastic, Great for roof capping or whatever else you may want to use it for. Special Casts The special non Linka casts can be found in their own area on the website the links are as below Download the new Casting Perfect Casts article released in May 2016 - See below 
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