Slush casting clear resin inside of a giant gar?

[wholesomejoe]

I'm working on a prop from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon.

I'm trying to recreate the "Peoplebusters" pack. Which is basically a clear tank filled with slime, and eyeballs floating around in it.

Seems easy enough of a design from a cartoon standpoint, but a bit more difficult to replicate in the real world.

Ideally I'd want it to light up or GLOW.. to hide the fact that there's no actual liquid in it, if I went that route.

My solution for the eyeballs is to hang them from the top with monofilament in varying lengths so they'll bob around as I walk.








I have the base for my tank. A 6 Gallon Carboy.



I've been racking my brain on how to make this work and it not weigh a ton. A gallon of water weighs about 8 lbs, so even if I only put 3 gallons of slime in it, we'd already be up to 24 lbs and the added risk of spillage. I need to be able to carry this around on my back at a convention, so weight is a concern. I posted about this on the facebook group and got a lot of answers, but most of the experimentation I've done so far has failed to work.

There are a couple of general suggestions people have given me.

- Paint it with some sort of translucent paint. Or slosh it around on the inside until it dries.
- Slush cast tinted green resin on the inside just enough to cover the inner walls (this idea seems the most feasible, but the material costs are high to experiment so I haven't done so yet.)
- Dye the section I want green with rit dye, and paint the outside with glow in the dark paint, and hit it with a UV/Blacklight to make it glow.
- Make a double wall like "magic baby bottles" so that I can put only a small amount of actual liquid in the bottle. I've thought about this too, but I can't see of a feasible way of doing it. They don't make this particular bottle any smaller so I'd have to fabricate something from scratch and I simply have no idea how to do that.

I'm trying to keep the costs down as much as possible. Suggestions are welcomed!

 

[Customrelic]

I had the same concerns while making my current project ( The Charlotte bell from national treasure ). I wanted it to look as real as possible without the weight. So im slush casting 1/4" of colored resin and backfilling with foam. The foam I am using is a two-part expandable foam. They sell all kinds of neon/ glow in the dark pigments to easily replicate slime. Then you can just use a foam back fill. Problem solved lol. It would probably only weigh a few pounds

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If you need the exact products I'd be more than happy to share them with you. I just checked and they sell plenty of neon green and glow-in-the-dark pigments for that resin

 

[wholesomejoe]

I had the same concerns while making my current project ( The Charlotte bell from national treasure ). I wanted it to look as real as possible without the weight. So im slush casting 1/4" of colored resin and backfilling with foam. The foam I am using is a two-part expandable foam. They sell all kinds of neon/ glow in the dark pigments to easily replicate slime. Then you can just use a foam back fill. Problem solved lol. It would probably only weigh a few pounds

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If you need the exact products I'd be more than happy to share them with you. I just checked and they sell plenty of neon green and glow-in-the-dark pigments for that resin

Yes please! I'm about to make a run to the craft store!

 

[Customrelic]

Unfortunately, i dont think you can get any of it from a craft store. Or maybe you can where you live lol. For my bell, im going to use a two part resin. Because im doing a cold cast and adding bronze, i will not be tinting the natural color of the resin. In your case, you will want to add the neon green or whatever green your using. Im sure you are familiar with casting/molding etc and understand the slush casting part. Believe it or not, you only need 1/8" of resin if you are not going to handle it. Since you said you will be bringing it to cons, you are easily going to need 1/4 to 1/2" of resin for strength. Ive done plenty of casts with 1/4" coat and its very strong. My biggest concern was akways scratches and punctures. If its too thin, the underlayers (whatever u use) will show. In my case with the bronze bell, im using a two part foam tinted black. This is just incase it somehow does get punctured or deeply scratched. It will make it hard to see. I would think if you are using a greenish color, you may want to tint your foam a shade of green as well. The foam actually adds tons of strength too beaides being light. So if it was me, i would order from a company called smooth on. For the resin, i would use task 15. Its strong and is perfect for slush casting. And there are tons of colors (neons, glow in the dark) u can use to color it. Check out their SO STRONG pigment colors and choose the best one for you. After you slush cast, get their FOAM IT line of foams and look at the foam it 3. It has lots of expansion and when used as backfill with pressure it's awesome. If you need more help, send me a pm and ill help as much as i can. I think you will be shocked at the colors you can make your resin when you see their chart

 

[cavx]

Interesting project for sure.

I noticed that in the images, there might be tiny bubbles. If they are bubbles you will be all good, because bubbles are what you get as soon as you mix resins. If you don't want bubbles, then this becomes a whole new level of hard (unless you have access to a vacuum chamber).

Slush casting a clear resin that has had both neon and Glow powder mixed, into you bottle would be the best option here.

The expanding foam to back fill is a neat idea except they are not clear, so you will lose light transmission.

As for suspending eyeballs in a hollow space, you would need these attached to clear plastic straws prior to slush casting.

And it highly unlikely you find these products at a craft store. My local Spotlight (fabric and craft) store sells a 500g Polyurethane resin kit, but it is not cheap at about $50. The local hardware store sells a 500g of polyester resin for $20, but stinky stuff and might be OK for this. You could probably get away with adding a few drops of food colour to the polyester as that stuff gets quite hot as it cures and would just cook it in.

As for buying real good stuff, you do have to pay high prices to get good casting supplies.

 

[wholesomejoe]

Interesting project for sure.

I noticed that in the images, there might be tiny bubbles. If they are bubbles you will be all good, because bubbles are what you get as soon as you mix resins. If you don't want bubbles, then this becomes a whole new level of hard (unless you have access to a vacuum chamber).

Slush casting a clear resin that has had both neon and Glow powder mixed, into you bottle would be the best option here.

The expanding foam to back fill is a neat idea except they are not clear, so you will lose light transmission.

As for suspending eyeballs in a hollow space, you would need these attached to clear plastic straws prior to slush casting.

And it highly unlikely you find these products at a craft store. My local Spotlight (fabric and craft) store sells a 500g Polyurethane resin kit, but it is not cheap at about $50. The local hardware store sells a 500g of polyester resin for $20, but stinky stuff and might be OK for this. You could probably get away with adding a few drops of food colour to the polyester as that stuff gets quite hot as it cures and would just cook it in.

As for buying real good stuff, you do have to pay high prices to get good casting supplies.

Yeah, what I was trying to do is just coat the inside with a thin layer and not actually filling the thing up. So far, my tests with regular ol resin from home depot haven't turned out too great. Someone suggested I may be able to "paint" the inside with a mixture of rubber cement and a tiny bit of green oil paint to get the desired effect. I don't have any oil paint on me right now to try it out.

 

[cavx]

Yeah, what I was trying to do is just coat the inside with a thin layer and not actually filling the thing up. So far, my tests with regular ol resin from home depot haven't turned out too great. Someone suggested I may be able to "paint" the inside with a mixture of rubber cement and a tiny bit of green oil paint to get the desired effect. I don't have any oil paint on me right now to try it out.

If Home Depot products is all you have to work with, then really have 2 choices - polyester casting resin or caulking silicone. With Resin, you might be able to add food colour, but you will have bubbles when you mix in the catalyst.

With silicone, you might be able to add a small amount of oil based paint. The silicone is going to be translucent at best, even the so called "clear" is not really that clear.

To paint it in, you are going to want to thin it first and I have found 10:1 mix of silicone to acetone can work to make caulking silicone "paint-able". You will only have a 10 min pot life and when it sets, it loses the adhesive properties of the raw product. When it is dry it will be sticking to the inside of your bottle, but you will be able to peel it off.

Silicone is probably more suited to goo like in Ninja Turtles than Ghost Busters, but for a small budget, it could work.

 

[wholesomejoe]

If Home Depot products is all you have to work with, then really have 2 choices - polyester casting resin or caulking silicone. With Resin, you might be able to add food colour, but you will have bubbles when you mix in the catalyst.

With silicone, you might be able to add a small amount of oil based paint. The silicone is going to be translucent at best, even the so called "clear" is not really that clear.

To paint it in, you are going to want to thin it first and I have found 10:1 mix of silicone to acetone can work to make caulking silicone "paint-able". You will only have a 10 min pot life and when it sets, it loses the adhesive properties of the raw product. When it is dry it will be sticking to the inside of your bottle, but you will be able to peel it off.

Silicone is probably more suited to goo like in Ninja Turtles than Ghost Busters, but for a small budget, it could work.

It's just what I have on hand right now to test with. I can get my hands on clear resin, but if rolling the home depot resin around in it isn't doing the trick at least in theory, then I wouldn't want to spend a ton of money on clear resin only to have it not work. I've tried the caulk and it was the best looking of anything I tried if still not really the effect I was after.

 

[Wolfdagon]

If you can get the double wall idea to work, I would suggest using green aloe vera gel as the liquid.

 

[wholesomejoe]

If you can get the double wall idea to work, I would suggest using green aloe vera gel as the liquid.

Yep, the trick is the double wall. I've yet to figure out a feasible way of doing it. They don't make this particular bottle in any smaller sizes. so the whole putting a smaller one inside a bigger one won't work here.

 

[wholesomejoe]

I settled on this..

silicone caulk mixed with neon food coloring. I'm also going to mix in some highlighter fluid so it will glow under black light.

Trying to figure out the best placement of lights.

 

[cavx]

See if they glow sticks in your local (camping?) stores. That stuff glows quite bright, though it will need to be redone after 48 hours but glow sticks are cheap enough.