Necrons Rebooted -- The ultimate Scarab factory

To all you experimenters out there,

after my first experiments with the Blue Stuff, leading to the production of many new Scarab bodies, I decided that it would be worth it to have a permanent (and improved) mold for the production of endless Scarab swarms (muhahaha!).

And once more, Green Stuff World provided me the right tools for the job! In this case, I am using the 2-component silicone putty.

First I needed a good encasing for the mold in which I arranged the Scarab prototypes. After searching the house, I found this plastic lid for some cosmetic product:

Again, I used UHU Patafix for fixating the Scarabs, leaving a few mm of space between them but also choosing the most compact arrangement possible to minimize the  amount of silicone required for the mold (this stuff is quite expensive!).

Now, it was time to mix the two components of the silicon putty. To get a better idea how much I would need for the mold, I first cut a part of only one component, spread it out in my hand to a little pancake and then held it inside the lid to see how much it would cover.
Based on that, I decided to use a quarter of the total amount for each component (which later turned out to be a bit too much maybe...)

Now, the cool part with this silicone putty is that it is super easy to work with! Many years ago, I already did some molds with fluid two component silicone, and in my memory this was more intricate to work with.
The silicone putty you just mix in your bare hands like Green Stuff.

But beware! You have only a couple of minutes before it starts hardening. So I tried to mix it as fast as possible 😁😁

And then I pressed it into the lid starting in the middle and working my way outwards (to allow the air to get out on the sides).

This is how it looked after:

The big advantage of using a transparent container for the mold, is that I could check underneath how well the silicone was covering the Scarabs and press with my thumbs from the other side to improve the fit.
Again beware though, you have only very little time for these corrections! In fact, I overdid it a bit with the results that the molds for two or three of the larger Scarabs got deformed.

After 10 minutes, the silicone is already hard to the touch, and you can remove the container and the scarabs:

I waited 24 hours before I first used the mold just to be sure it was fully dried. As casting material, I used the Acrylic Resin as well from GreenStuffWorld:

And after half an hour or so, we have our first new Scarabs ready to be cleaned and used!

(If you look very carefully at the big Scarabs, you see that I slightly messed up 3 or 4 of their molds by pressing the silicone too much too long when making the mold. Next time I will be more careful).

This was my first attempt to use the silicone putty to make molds, and I have to say that it is quite easy to use and gives great results!