zombies: I molded 100 plastic zombies

And here's my newest zombie horde!
And you read that right, I molded them  myself. Read on for all the details...

There a feeling every wargamer knows when they finish painting a really big unit. In this case it's even more satisfying since I got to do the original sculpt of the figure, make the mold, and mold them all as well.

How I did it

It's a little hard to see all the details but that's my mold for the zombies.
Those are custom frames made from Aluminum C clamps. I ground them down, added the vent for injection nozzle and added some pins to keep everything lined up perfectly.
The mold itself is made from 2 part epoxy.
I sculpt my original figure from FIMO and green stuff.
After baking it's ready for the mold.
The process of making the molds is usually a 3 day process of waiting for the epoxy to cure.
It's hard to tell from the picture but I still have a problem with tiny bubbles getting trapped in the mold. I'm in the process of building a vacuum chamber now to take care of that.

Then it's time to head to the injection molder! This one is mine, homemade in my own crude little shop. Those of you who followed the blog over on blogger know the pain this thing has caused me over the years!
Right now it takes about 3 minutes to melt a batch and then about 15 minutes to mold 3 miniatures from that batch.
It's a slow process with many miscasts but I'm in the process of upgrading now with some new mold frames, some speed clamps and a couple of pre-melt chambers.
I should then be able to crank these out fast enough to sell them at a decent price.

I know you all want to see more pictures of zombies...

Here's my zombie horde, fresh from the mold! I kept a few of the miscasts that are missing their heads or an arm because, hey!, they're zombies and would help break up the uniform look.

Going through the molding process taught me alot about just how much detail will shop up on the finished figure. I found that very fine detail or small details will tend to blend together. My next batch will be done very differently!

I did a speed paint of the whole unit so I could get it on the table but they paint job is "good enough" for my purposes.

Picture
So all in all, not bad. As I said in the previous post these are more than good enough for my personal use but my setup will need a little more hardware before I can get up to production quality and start selling.