Hi! Just came across this community/forum while browsing the internet. I’m wondering if anyone here has experience with resin casting, and whether the appropriate tools for it would be available in the VHS. Just kind of curious after coming across the vast amount of artisan keycaps that people showed off at the Vancouver Mechanical Keyboard meet, and inspired to (attempt) to make my own
Can non-members come into the VHS without paying, and use the tools/ take a look around? I see that there are open nights, but beyond that i’m not so sure. As a student, i’m not so sure about $60/month for a workspace that I may or may not use.
We just had a guy making custom keycaps at the space but he recently moved away. We do have the supplies necessary to do resin casting. We have both a vacuum tank and a pressure tank.
But casting key caps are fairly difficult. it is a small object and bubbles can easily be trapped. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it right. I think the last guy to try this took him about a month of trial and error, 5 different molds, and he was still only getting like a 75% success rate.
Feel free to come to open nights and you can see what the space is about and I can give you a brief overview of the equipment we have as well as point you in the right direction, but i only have a little experience with resin casting.
We definitely have all the tools you’d need to make key caps, the trick would be in building your master and mold. Check out Punished Props acadamy for lots of YouTube videos on resin casting and mold making. We have both a pressure chamber and vacuume chamber in the space, that’s pretty much all you need tool wise to make great casts.
