Designer toy collectors probably have all thought of making / manufacturing their own toy at some point but really have no clue about how to do it. Well even I as an industrial designer have not seen the make-ur-toy-from-garage process presented in a step-by-step fashion. But thanks to R* for linking me to J6Studio’s site where Jester shows how he roto-molded his kickass design. I’m just showing a watered down version here, please go to his website if you want to find out more!
Like all designers, a design starts with a sketch:
Then it’s your wireframe and clay model:
Next, you make a mold in a box (you need the walls) with silicon. You can buy liquid silicon from various online sites, it’s basically two parts of liquid combined to make silicon solid just like epoxy.
Make sure you got a pouring hole for your liquid resin to go in (the right pix), if you are rotomolding, then you need a plug (left pix) so the resin don’t come out when it’s spinning. Jester put a little hole in the plug so some of the heat can escape, very important.
Now you have to have a rotary spinner. Jester made his own (See his video HERE). For those of you that don’t know what rotary molding is, imagine taking this mold, spinning it in constant speed until the liquid resin inside adheres to all sides uniformly. At the end you get a hallo plastic toy just like the vinyl toys you buy nowadays.
If you don’t want to roto-mold it and are ok with a solid toy, you can just pour resin straight into the mold. Jester also did that. You can also pour translucent resins and other materials in.
Then WALA! You’re done, sand off the parting lines.
The design is SWEET and so are the graphics.
