Jurassic World Metal Emblem

Have an old plaster mold just lying around? Carve an awesome symbol into it with just a pocketknife, in seven easy steps! Then I’ll show you how to melt down some metal over an open fire and pour directly into your mold. Wallah! Your very own Jurassic World metal Insignia. I’m also entering this into a contest, so please vote!

Start with a blank, hopefully somewhat flat chunk of plaster. I used an old casting of my foot that my foot
doctor had made and was just sitting in the garage, but anything will do.

Now I suggest you print out an image of the symbol you will be cutting. And make sure you flip the image
because you are going to want to carve it out in mirror. That’s because when you pop it out of the mold it will be backwards from your carving. Cut out around that printed image, and trace the outline onto the carving surface. Carve that out (with a small pointy pocketknife) at an even depth of about 1/8 inch.

Carve out the rim, but be sure too at an even depth and study this image to get the corners right.

Now carve out the center band at the same depth of the rim so it will meet up as in the image.

Whittle out some little palm trees at the bottom. This part is hard, but just try and make some pointy little bushes.

Now for the hardest part. I used a piece of paper with the Jurassic World symbol printed on it and a
piece of carbon paper beneath that. Then I lined it up on my carving and traced the image with a pencil, pressing the carbon paper underneath into drawing the T-rex onto my work. It was a little hazy,
so I then went over it with a pencil to darken the lines up. Now that you have your T-rex drawn onto it, start carving. I kind of over did the detail, seeing as the metal tends to not flow into every little piece, so don’t try as hard as I did. Remember, mirror image.

Now use the same method to get your words drawn onto your carving. And finish it!

But wait! You have not even poured the metal. Before you start pouring metal, you should bake the plaster in the oven at a medium temperature of about 150 - 250° for many, many hours. I didn’t bake mine when I poured it and moister trapped in the plaster got superheated, turned to gas, and bubbled up distorting my emblem. The picture above is the end result. I let it cool, popped it out of the mold, melted it down again and poured it right back in. I did this three more times and there was still moister inside! So I baked it in the oven a lot and then did my last pour, which the end result is my cover photo. You can see a bubble still! But with my information hopefully you can do better than me.

Now, find some chunks of pot metal, zinc, tin or any metal with a low melting point. Find a little more than you think you’ll need because when you melt it down there will be slag. Melt it down in can over a fire like in the photo.

Pour it through a screen into some can( like in the photo ). The screen will catch the slag and the purified metal will rest in the can.

Pop out the metal once cooled and brush of any crud. You can repeat step 10 if you don’t think it’s
purified enough. Slag in the finished product tends to not look too good.

Put it back in the can, melt it down, and pour into the cast.

If your metal overflowed a little, don’t worry; just grind of the excess to the desired thickness and edges.

By the way, if you need an image to use when your carving this one is what I used. It’s already been flipped too!