Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make: Believe // Rawrz Toys”.
I’M Victoria Rose, I’m co-founder at Rogers toys and I’m Anson blood, also co-founder when Anna and I met its underwriter. Actually, she had seen some of my drawings and post-its all around the studio and she thought wow. This would make a really great toy and I was like actually I really want to make toys and she’s like well. You know I can do the modeling part. Do you want to give me some artwork and thus for our choice was born? There are small but fierce little toys, so we thought roars. Toys was the perfect name for them, so we started by going to small fairs maker fairs, there’s all these ones that Victoria puts out and she’s like. I hope this one doesn’t sell today because it’s my favorite and then it’ll sell the way that we start out making arts toys.
Is I design a sketch and then it’s really good. I hand it over to Anne and I take it into the computer and 3d model it and oftentimes, I’m inspired by her sketches and there’s like some areas left to interpretation. So I try and take similar lines that we used in our characters and apply it to our new animals, so that way, there’s a consistency between a mom as a 3d modeler. The most important thing is the results and how good they look. So I went with the form one because it has really great results for the price. Some of the big machines are just you know. Only big companies can afford them. So this is great for the home user to be able to kind of get into the technology and start playing with it. So this is a resin based printer.
What you do is you fill the bottom here with resin and a laser shoots from the bottom and does each layer and as that, laser cures, each layer. The platform raises up, so it’s sort of reverse of how you normally 3d printing. The printer also comes with this tray, which is a cleaning station, for it have a little bag of alcohol. So when the toy comes out, it’s still covered in the liquid resin. So you want to clean it off by soaking it in here for a few minutes, and then you can do all of your other finishing cleaning to pick it off the build platform and everything right here, which kind of contains the stickiness support structure that the preform Builds tries to create tiny connection points with the model so that they’re easily snapped off here today is my casting and molding workstation.
If, here you can see that I’ve started making a mold, we place the toy in the center and then we’re gon na create a box and fill that with silicone once it’s completed. This is what the finished mold looks like. This will get cut open and will inject liquid plastic and that’s how our toys are made. I wonder what the world did with that heckler the bottom plate acts as the reservoir when we pull it out of the mold.
We pulled this piece out. First then, we pull the top off and the bottom, and then we have a perfect blue cast octopus. So you can see that I’ve mixed the sort of clear, together with a catalyst and in the act of stirring I’ve, actually created a lot of air bubbles and the silicone. So what we’re gon na do is we’re going to put it in a back chair.
Put it inside your chamber, you make sure that you’ve got a good seal along the edge. The back chamber will actually suck that air out and leave your silicone bubble free. So all of our air has been introduced back into the chamber. You can see that, although there’s still some bubbles, these bubbles will dissipate on their own and the mold will be bubble free.
The reason I prefer to use sort of Claro for anything else is that it actually is so clear that you can see where you’re cutting and make sure that you get a nice clean cut and then also in casting you can see. If you have air bubbles or not, and by cutting a jagged line like this, what I’m doing is I’m creating an edge for the mold to piece back together nicely. If you cut a straight line, it would just kind of pull away from itself and not hold itself. Now we’ve moved over to the painting and resin casting workstation, and this is where the painting magic happens, so to speak, the balloon for the classic blue for the whale and then some purples are really popular as well as I do a rub and buff gold or Antique bronze to convert into some steampunk later.
Basically, we would rubberband these and then once they’re rubber banded. We would mix up two parts of liquid plastic 50/50 and then we would take a syringe fill it carefully, put it into the injection spot that we’ve made on the syringe and then very slowly inject into our molds. So this is a pressure pot. We’Ve actually taken $ 100 pop for paint from Harbor Freight and converted it into a resin casting pressure chamber.
So you put the air valve on and then it fills the chamber with air or PSI pounds of pressure. What that does is it puts a ton of pressure on top of the resin molds, forcing the air to come out, and then you have bubble free, clean castings inside is a nicely cast Rajoy, so you remove the rubber bands in the X plastic and then very Carefully loosen the mold and then oh, it’s going to pop once they’re spray-painted, we hand paint all the little details and nuances. Then we have a really great time customizing as well. So we have a watermelon octopus that we’ve done. We’Ve done some superhero octopuses and whales and Tommy a zombie is just any kind of theme that we can come up with and, of course, our classic accessory is the doughnuts for the narwhal horns because they were meant to be together. But I’m also looking for other food items that I can make we’re clearly motivated by ice cream cupcakes. I’M sensing there’s a lot of love and time that goes into the process of making each individual play and, as you can see, how much of the process truly is handcrafted and special to us. .