The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook

I am interested in composites and metal-casting for auto and general hobby applications. This book is a great and complete primer on how to make molds and how to cast objects, which techniques are directly applicable to molding-making and casting with metals and composites. It is also far more understandable and complete than primer books in either metal-casting or composites, which are less well written and assume that you have a certain knowledge or skillset. Plus, you can teach yourself these techniques with materials that are pretty safe and cheap- much cheaper than carbon fiber cloth and way less dangerous than molten aluminum.Just a few examples- The book teaches you to make molds and then cast objects in wax; I applied this technique directly to my work with lost wax aluminum casting. Mold making with RTV silicone in combination with mother molds; this technique allowed me to reproduce highly complex parts in composite materials without the numerous parting marks that would have otherwise shown up with a multi-piece hard mold.Bonus- Complete plans for an easy-to-build vacuum-forming machine; I used this machine with a shop vac to "knock off" a copy of a borrowed hood scoop, in impact-resistant plastic. The machine set-up for the operation and making the finished part took less than 15 minutes!

I owned this book a long time ago, and lost it. Countless times I wished I had it handy, especially for technical information of what material is compatible with other materials for casting and molding. I replaced it, and couldn't be more pleased. It's like having a mentor around for advice when you need it. Easy enough for a beginner to get started, and plenty of useful information for the more advanced to refer to. Great techniques for prop artists, fx artists, statuary casters, and more. A great book on mold making, and a companion to more advanced special effects books like Savini's Grande Illusions 1 &2, and Debreceni's Special Makeup Effects.

The main reason -- as unfair as it is -- I am not giving five stars is the age of the book. There are so many products being offered to the young artist today, with various inflated and contradictory claims, one wishes there was a book this calm and straightforward that could cut through the marketing gloss and get back to what the basic processes are, what the chemicals do, what will probably work and what to watch out for. This book is solid and good, but the materials it refers to are not so often found in their original form in the shopping mall crafts stores of today.Anyhow. Read this book. Whether you are about to pull a resin cast for the first time, or whether you (like me) got a basic familiarity back in college but have forgotten many of the details, this offers grounding in How Casting Works in a more-or-less step-by-step, from simple to complex, way.Of the many things to salute Thurston James for, is the extremely practical viewpoint. Thurston is THEATER. If you haven't done theater, you may not understand. It is about letting go of "the usual way" and doing what gets it on stage by opening night, under budget, without anyone getting hurt and in a way that will hopefully stay in one piece until the show closes. Some books might artificially limit themselves, saying "here's how to cast in resin, here's resin." Thurston says "Here's resin and how to do it right. And here's some cheaper substitutes if that works better for you." If he was writing today he'd almost certainly say "And you can just skip all these steps and have it 3d printed -- but here's the downside to that, and here's resin for when that just plain works better."Right at the very start, he tells you it will be messy, you are going to be dealing with chemicals that could damage your health, and you WILL fail; sometimes a mold will break or a fresh batch of resin refuse to cure. It happens. You have to be prepared for the mess and for the occasional "learning experience." Which are words which should be at the front of EVERY "how to" book.What this book is not, is a step-by-step hold-you-by-the-hand. It does go into detail, and it does basically follow a complete cycle from original model to duplicate (over and over, with different methods) but it isn't a tutorial in book form.What it is, is nearly encyclopedic. Now, I learned theater crafts at a high school shop that believed in touching on everything. The first show of my first season was wing-and-border and we got to play with cut drops and roll drops. The next was a box set and we built standard and hard-cover TV flats. The next was sculptural and we carved blocks of styrofoam and covered them in glue and cheesecloth. Before we left that school we'd worked with hot melt, celastic, vacuuform products (we didn't have our own machine)... For decades after, I'd be working on a set or prop and I'd say "Hey, there's this material I used once in high school that might work here. Lemme see what I can dig up on it."Well, that is this book. Plaster molds. Dental alginate. Silcone RTV. Latex casting. Slipcasting. Fiberglas, celastic and paper-mache. Paraffin, sugar glass, expanding foam, and Durham's Rock Hard. And vacuumforming! If you've read through it, then you will be -- despite the age of the book -- prepared to go into your local store and actually make sense of the packaged casting and molding products being offered there. And you will be much better prepared to actually use them.

I found this book to be very useful. I purchased it for novice prop-making and cosplay use. I'm sure I could have found most of this information online somewhere, however, I am unfamiliar with some of the terms for the techniques and having everything laid out in a collected format was very convenient instead of searching for terms I didn't know or techniques I didn't realize existed. I will say, the type setting of this book gives it's age away. The information is still highly useful even if the typesetting is quaint and the photo look like old xerox copies of copies.

Good book

I bought this book simply hoping for a few tricks to mold making that I didn't already know. I got the book and put it on the bookshelf not even looking at it. One night I was bored and started to thumb through it. Wow. I couldn't put it down. LOTS of info on things I didn't think it would cover from making breakable glass to building your own vacuum forming machine. Multiple casting techniques from plaster to resins to silicone. If you do any theatre scene work, build props or simply do art projects you will enjoy this book. Well worth the price.