I've always liked the aluminum club plaques you see on rear bumpers. Never have belonged to a club until some friends and I started being at the same car shows a lot. More as a joke, just for the fun of it, we started calling our selves the ''Old Guys with Hot Rods''. Since then I have designed a logo based on Crumb's truckin dude with some changes. This logo was printed on shirts and hats, jus like a ''real'' club. Some time back a woodworking friend made an oval wooden plaque with a good rim for me to use as a basis. I looked all over the internet for small (1 inch or less) letters but couldn't find any that were reasonable - they wanted to custom make them. Finally a bag of letters was found in a craft store, a little too large but I used them anyway. The trunkin dude was modeled in clay ( Fimo-Sculpy type) and baked then glued on with the letters. Since there was only one size of letters to work use the word ''with'' was modeled in clay as well. There didn't seem to be a good way to put our location on in letters so I compromised and modeled a small Illinois which was mounted on a plan disc with a little dot to represent ''us''. Once the whole thing was finished and sealed with primer I looked into casting methods. A friend was a big help as he had made a mold from one of his aluminum plaques and cast more in resin. A search through a large art supply catalog provided a source for mold making silicone rubber and casting resin.
As you can see in the pictures (I hope) the plaque was made, molded, and assembled. A box was made and sealed from leaks a little larger than the wood plaque and two part mold making silicone rubber was poured in. After it was cured I tested the volume of the mold with ounces of water to know how much resin to mix for each cast. It turned out there was enough resin in the kit to make four plaques. Once out of the mold the plaques were painted all the same but for the shirts which were the color of the owners car. According to the package the resin should be strong and durable, but since all it has to do is hang out it should work fine.
As you can see in the pictures (I hope) the plaque was made, molded, and assembled. A box was made and sealed from leaks a little larger than the wood plaque and two part mold making silicone rubber was poured in. After it was cured I tested the volume of the mold with ounces of water to know how much resin to mix for each cast. It turned out there was enough resin in the kit to make four plaques. Once out of the mold the plaques were painted all the same but for the shirts which were the color of the owners car. According to the package the resin should be strong and durable, but since all it has to do is hang out it should work fine.