Let's say you're making a resin clutch mold. You can get started with this project by making the silicone mold yourself. You first need to get the right silicone rubber, a soft compound that hardens pretty quickly. You can find this in any specialist shop if you're a plastic molding enthusiast. One of the things you need to understand about silicone is the curation process.

Curation makes silicone elastic, and its brittleness depends on your chosen degree of hardness. If you overstretch it, it can crack and fracture.

This is where we have to put our heads to study the hardness levels of silicone. The material is available in several degrees of hardness measured on the shore. If you want a solid resin clutch mold, you have to understand how the low value stands for high elasticity and a high value for low elasticity:

A shore of 0 to 20 offers a high level of flexibility, meaning the material is soft and quite unstable for your purposes.

A shore value of 20 to 40 is a sign of medium elasticity, which is flexible and dimensionally stable.

A Shore value of 40 to 80 is for silicone that hardly elastic and very hard to mold. This silicone is much more resistant to stress but quite brittle.

Choosing the best degree of hardness

Choosing the hardness for the silicone used in your resin clutch mold depends on the overall quality of the product you're creating. You can go with the true and tried trial and error method, but this can be costly. Here are some tidbits that can help you make a better choice when thinking through your designs:

-Soft material it's easier to release from the mold, but high elasticity with low brittleness makes the mold unstable, with the risk of being misshapen.

-The opposite happens with a solid mold, rigid materials are not so easy to release, and you must be careful to avoid the brittle silicone from breaking.

-Casting molds with high shore value are much easier to handle since they aren't mobile, thus making it harder to be misshapen.

Depending on your project, there are other criteria to consider, such as the resistance of the material to chemicals, something that gets easier if you work with epoxy resin, concrete, or other casting materials.

To make a good resin clutch mold, you need more than silicone rubber. There are more differences between mold production methods, but these complexities are for larger projects. Look for a self-made frame and a blank to reproduce a negative mold with the original shape. If you want to work without the original mold, you may omit the frame, but you'll need the blank.

Resin options are vast and diverse, but you must work with established parameters that won't discourage people from getting your product. Your resin clutch mold needs to be competitive against all options in the market, or you can end up with a costly custom-made mold that won't deliver the goods regarding earnings.