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Thing A Week 10: Rubber Stamp

I needed a rubber stamp to mark the packages I was sending out from my etsy store, so I figured…why not make one.

I didn’t have any stamp rubber laying around, or the tools to carve it…so I started by making both of those.

I had a little bit of mold max 60 left over from previous projects, but not enough to make anything with, so I cast some small pucks of it to carve.  Nothing special, just filled some plastic caps I had from jars and made three pucks.  See here for how to use Mold Max 60, or just buy some stamp rubber from any craft store, its super cheap.  I just like doing things with what I have on hand.

But I didn’t have any tools…so I took some sheet metal I had, and bent and sharpened then until they looked like the carving tools I had looked up on the internet.  I used a technique very similar to how I made the wax carving tools.

To get the larger more shallow carver I used a metal rode to bend the sheet around after sharpening it.  The vice grips are just holding the sheet while I hammer.

I put sharpened up some dowel rods and put some epoxy in there to keep them strong, only made two, and ended up doing a fine job of carving.

 

I started by sanding down one puck to get rid of the shine left by the casting process.

Then I printed out a template and got to carving.  The tools woked well, but I realized half way through, that for such a simple design o could have just cut the shape out with a saw. 

The floppyness of the rubber was making it hard to get good stamps.  So I built a backer.

I had some aluminum clad black acrylic that was nice and stiff, so I cut a circle out and glued it and a small wooden handle to it.

Then I did a couple more stamps, cutting away any rubber that was messing up the design.

I realized the middle wasn’t getting inked because the ink pad was slightly warped, but I really liked the way it made a sort of cloud pattern inside the crow.

Came out well, and I still have plenty of materials to try and make some fancier ones.

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