The Tao of Salamander Demolding
(Now there's a blog post title for ya!) We've been trying to make a nice copy of this here salamander. These are copies in ceramic and pewter I made a few years ago. But whenever we tried to make new clay copies, it kept breaking when being demolded. We figured one of the molds was no good, so we discarded it and used the other one. But that never worked either. I tried a much more flexible mold material (Po-Yo Putty) and figured that would solve the problem, but still it didn't work. In hindsight I probably pressed the mold material around the legs of the critter too tightly, making it very narrow. But still, it shouldn't be so complicated - it's a simple little object. I then figured we needed to use a release agent, some vegetable oil in the mold. We never needed to do that before but surely that would solve our salamandrical problems. Nope. So by this point, it was becoming personal. I had done this before, thousands of Siloi...