The Hairy Hendecahedra Project (post two)

If excelsior was as ridiculously cheap and available as it once was, I wouldn't have resorted to such an odd method to try an stabilize my Corex (like cardboard, but plastic) and clear plastic tape mold. This isn't the first time I've tried pouring concrete into a Corex mold.

 The stained dodecaocta compound chilling on the deck with various other old experiments.


Didn't turn out near as crisp as the mold. I was unprepared for the weight of the concrete squishing my mold. Even though I had it sitting in a pile of sand, it still warped some. When I took a big, old rasp and tried to square it up while it was still green, (not totally cured), it was working great and pointing up nicely till I hit the Chert rocks I used to extend my scrap grout (I'd brought home the left overs from work). Then I just had to say, "I meant to do that", and like it a little crooked.

 This time I was a little more hard headed, and employed more heroic methods than a pile of sand. I thought, there's other ways to stabilize a mold. I wanted to try the dry pack, barely damp sand with just a little Portland-cement. this would work great, except it a mess, sand is heavy, yo have to break it up to get the piece out each time... Our deck is small, one fair mess fills it all. I thought what about the vacuum-clothes packing thingy. I considered a lot of stuff to harden with the vac, and settled on rabbit bedding because its cheap and smells good, and is't easy to clean up.

   As long as the vacuum is running, this worked good, sorta. Concrete dries slow, even with hot water. The plastic bag had pleats that didn't lay down, Oh yeah rubber gloves my hands were so rough from the lime in the concrete they felt furry for a week. I pulled the mold the next day, it still wasn't hard hard. I saved the spout stuff to fill with and tried ti point it up. Not so great.

even after a lot of messy tweaking it was a bit saggy not too precise and starting to get squishy (a technical term) enough I knew to let it dry. no way there's allot of these coming this way. It probably woulda worked for plaster, but I wanted furry concrete not plaster. At least I didn't burn up the vacuum cleaner, this time. I gotta say when the vac was running the shavings were very firm, but I doubt I'll try this again.