Large Scale Molds
 

To the left is the mother mold with bracing needed to accommodate six fifty-five gallon barrels of rubber.
   
This image shows the finished part, made with 825 pounds of cast and sculpted wax just before the pouring of the rubber.
 

   

This picture shows one of the rubber sections still on the monolith at the time of demolding. The cast sculpture (brown) is poured grout, cast over the plumbing, but before the 900 pound and 1,1000 pound cap pieces we hoisted to the top of the rock feature.
   
The image to the right is a 3,000 pound twenty-two piece rubber mold used to cast a 30,000 pound rock and water feature.

 

The image to the left shows the mold being bolted to a footer pad just before we pump in the 30,000 pounds of intrinsically colored, fiber reinforced grout, all over a matrix of steel rebar. Note the water supple line in the center.
 

 

Above is the beginning of a 250 pound fossil mold containing dozens and dozens of fossils.

Lightweight Styrofoam Molds

The top set of images shows what could very well be the worlds largest Styrofoam mold that we created from scratch, in California, and then shipped to the island of Kauai, to cast what is called an “escarpment”. It serves as a memorial for The Navajo people. The small sandstone-like mountain that we cast inside the mold provides an opportunity for many people on the other side of the globe to learn about a culture that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience, as they may never get to travel to the Southwest portion of the continental United States.

In this first image below, we load the pigmented grout mix into the auger mixer and prepare to pump the mix into the mold. A partially de-molded escarpment can be seen in the background.

To the left you can see the first tier of the second half of our six-tiered
styrofoam mold.


 
The image to the right shows the nineteen-foot long stacked mold sections, with sand bags as weights.

The image to the left shows the inside of part of our mold, or negative space, in which the grout will be pumped. The massive protrusion you see here is what formed the cave. This occurred in the bottom two tiers of the mold.
The image to the right shows the first two tiers at the far end of the mold.

 

The image to the left shows a smaller (17 feet long) mold within the larger one, that we used to cast an 80,000 pound stone arch bridge, in the air, over a stainless steel armature, in order to bridge the canyon.
 
The picture to the right shows one horizontal level of epoxy-coated reinforcement bar, forming a massive grid for structural reinforcement, that was buried inside the pour.

Here, to the left, we are adding detail to the mold’s surface. The black area shows the portion of one mold section that has already been coated with urethane rubber.
Moving on to a new project now, to the right, you can see the beginning of how we created a more specialized mold, which we used to cast a monolith sculpture, upon which a statue of Abraham Lincoln will rest for the next few centuries, give or take a century.

Inside the mold, in the image to the left, we have begun to attach rubber that will translate into the monolith’s surface detail and texture.

To the right here, is a great view inside the mold, on site that shows the epoxy-coated rebar that was next encased by some 20,000 pounds of intrinsically colored grout!

And finally, to the left, we show you this picture, simply so you can see the level of intricate, layered rock detail that we are able to achieve in the Styrofoam.