about vacuum forming

[mermaid_lover]

Hi guys,

This might be a stupid question, but I couldn't find a post on this (but please excuse me if there is...)
So I recently bought a very cheap vacuum former, I'll be using it for making chocolate molds.:)
But I was wondering since I'll be using clay anyway if you couldn't make a small scale sheet in clay, vacuum form it and then make a bunch of positives out of it in silicone.
Or to create one big scale sheet (and big vacuum former) and make a lot of positives ( so that you could reuse the clay )

mermaid kisses!

[Arking]

Hmn I've heard of using silicone like foam to make negatives using vacuum forming but not much in the ways of positives. I wonder if the silicone would have enough stiffness to not get smushed during the vacuum process if there are delicate ridges etc. Something tells me it should work seeing as I've encountered some heavy silicone molds before...

[mermaid_lover]

Well, I wouldn't use the silicone as a mold ( I might have explained it wrong) the negative would be of a thermoplastic and I would pour the positive out of silicone. Like if you would make a mini scale sheet out of clay and pour silicone over it, like you would for a normal tail, but then just smaller.

[Arking]

Oh I figured since you brought up reusing the clay you intended to make multiple negatives using the silicone. Now that you've clarified yes, that would be really easy to do and probably cost effective. You could make multiple negatives using thermoplastic to speed up the casting process of silicone as well. :)

[mermaid_lover]

Thank you for answering, I'll definitely try it out once I have the materials :)