Review: Instant Mold

A couple of weeks ago a friend sent me a link to the Cool Mini or Not storefront that sells Instant Mold. The video on the site shows how this stuff works. Basically, you drop it in hot water for a few minutes, wait for it to soften, then remove it from the water and press anything you want to copy into it and wait for it to cool off. When it's cooled, remove the object and you have a perfect mold. Just press Green Stuff into it and wait for it to cure and you have a copy of whatever you made a mold of. 

The beauty of it is that it is cheap and completely reusable. The video claims that nothing sticks to it. The man in the video is also seen making a two sided mold of a sword and replicating it with Green Stuff. 

So I bought some and decided to put it to the test.

First, a couple of caveats. I an not good at using Green Stuff except for the most basic things. However, I do have some experience with molds and have made many two part molds. With those qualifications, I decided I am the perfect person to test this as most people that would purchase this item probably have the same experience. 

The video shows the man making a simple one-sided mold of a base. To this end, Instant Mold is great. If you have a simple object and only need a one sided mold, you need to get this product. The alternative is to make a Green Stuff mold, which is a pain for anyone who has tried it. There are many tutorials for Green Stuff molds and casting, such as this one from the Wraith Gate and this one from Warseer. (For MANY other tutorials, visit the Berks 40K Tutorial page). 

I can see Instant Mold being used for bases, crates, barrels, icons, etc. If you have an icon for a Space Marine's shoulder armor, this would be the perfect product. 

But I wanted to see how well Instant Mold does for two sided molds of more complex items. So I chose two items at random and tried to copy them: an Ork head and a building post.

The biggest challenge when doing this is cutting the mold in half. You need to find the best placement of the mold line. The good news is that it doesn't have to be "flat" - you can cut it in any direction. This allows you to follow the contour of whatever you are molding to a much better degree than simple pour casts. The bad news is that the Instant Mold is not entirely see through, making this task difficult.

With the Ork's head, you can see that there is some aspects of the detail that are great and others aren't so great. What I didn't do was show you the mold line across the top of the head - it's hideous. I squeezed down  as hard as I could on the mold, but the mold line was still pretty thick. I lost some detail on the head where I cut it off. 

The building post is a complete wreck. It is too small and I knew it was mess up when I was pressing the Green Stuff into the mold. Cutting the mold was difficult and you can see the marks I made in the original when I was cutting it out of the cast. 

For highly detailed two-sided items, I would say that Instant Mold is a fail. You are not going to be making copies of Space Marine parts and building a Green Stuff army. Most model manufacturers design their models so they are difficult to copy. 

I would even go so far are to say that you aren't even going to copy most weapons. There is just too much detail, too many odd cuts to be able to cast them properly. So for those hoping to copy a bunch of meltaguns, you probably will not be satisfied with the results. 

Simple weapons and custom made items are all you are going to be able to do with as two-sided cast using Instant Mold.  

Overall I think this is a great product. I think, however, that it will not meet the expectation of the person who thinks they will be able to save money by molding themselves special weapons or whole figures. But that is not the purpose of Instant Mold. The purpose of this product is to replicate small, simple items.