How To Make A Self Locking Silicone Mold

This week’s video shows how I make a duplicate copy of a medium sized part, roughly the size of a large tissue box.

It is essentially a straight pull box of an injection molded part.Here is the interesting part, it is a self locking and aligning mold …the two halves of the mold lock together to seal themselves. This means you don’t need rubber bands or weights to hold the mold together, the mold will not leak out the sides, only through the vent holes. This should give you more consistent cast resin parts, and better quality parts.

The key, (literally) to all this magic is using some basic laser cut cardboard parts to make the alignment keys for the mold. This aligns the two halves of the mold and lock’s them together. You could of course cut the parts by hand but the laser is much faster and more accurate.