Just got reminded WHY one should wear acrylic gloves when working with silicone, NOT latex. Something I completely forgot about while trying to make silicone tires in a latex mould.
Tried making tires for that BJD wheelchair. Sculpted prototype, made silicone mould, poured latex into that (rotation casting) to get a proper rubber tire. Latex is a single air-drying component instead of silicone (two components that react chemically), but when poured into a mould it dries much slower because it gets less air exposure. It DOES dry, though- just takes forever.
The result wasn’t as good as I wanted (little bubbles here and there) and I wanted to speed up the process, so I thought I’d reverse the system and also get rid of any allergy problems the tires might cause. Silicone tires, latex mould.
While clearing out my desk to try out the new mould (which took ages to make, because the latex could only be applied in thin layers), I noticed a previous test-run I did of a silicone poured onto different stuff (because I’m not a complete idiot and usually try out materials I’ve never used in combination before, to see if they can actually be used together). At of those tests, some of the silicone didn’t dry properly. I paid it no mind, thinking I over-saturated it with colour (which I did). But today I noticed the silicone in the cup had dried by now, while the silicone poured onto a bit of latex hadn’t. I got suspicious, and ran another test with pure, uncoloured silicone. Just to be sure, didn’t want to ruin my new mould. Turns out silicone that ran off the latex right from the beginning did cure, but whatever stayed in contact with it for longer than a few seconds didn’t. I was baffled. And annoyed that my mould was now useless and I’d have to go about casting tires in the tedious, slow, less-than-perfect way. And then I suddenly remembered at the academy they always supplied acrylic gloves to mould-makers, not latex ones. No-one ever really explained, and I just kept buying acrylic gloves out of habit- but I just spent five days re-inventing the wheel on how NOT to make wheels to find out WHY one shouldn’t wear latex gloves with when working with silicone.
Learn from my stupid tunnel vision here, guys.
