You may recall I thought I was going to be able to unload a bunch of pewter miniature figurines onto UT for eventual profit! but a wrench was thrown into those plans. And you may even recall that I had given my son a sampling of those figurines, assuming he might like them.
Most of these things come disassembled. You are supposed to trim the little casting marks off the pieces and glue them together using epoxy. Well, my boy thought they were really cool until it came time to glue them together. Turns out we didn't have any of the appropriate kind of glue in the house. So he tried using a soldering iron to see if he could melt the little guys arm stub and melt the socket and jamb them together. It didn't work. But he did discover the incredibly low melting temperature of pewter.
We got to talking about what we could do with a pound or two of pewter. I explained what little I knew about making molds, and we racked our brains to come up with a cool nick knack to make.
It was decided that we would carve a mold out of plaster of paris, which I did have on hand, and try making a neckerchief slide. A neckerchief is kind of a bandanna that Boy Scouts wear around their necks, and the slide holds the whole thing together. There is an official Boy Scout slide, and we both own one of those, but there is a long tradition of specialty slides being made to commemorate different stuff. We thought it would be cool to make a slide that is unique to our troop, and just show up wearing them one day at a meeting.
So the first thing to do is to mix up some plaster.
We used yogurt container bottoms to be the molds for the little pucks we were gonna carve into slides.
