[Mark A]

Hey all,
I am trying to preserve my engagement flowers. This is my first resin project and admittedly I realize this is a bit over my head for the complexity of it. I suspended the flowers in an acrylic box (about 1/4 inch thick acrylic walls and 12 x 12 x 12″ size) and then poured 2 inches of Liquid Glass deep pour. It got nicely tacky around 15 hours and everything was looking great. I poured the second pour at 3.5 inches or so. That’s when disaster struck.. Within about 6 hours it got super hot and started warping the acrylic box and deforming at the edges. I panicked and put 2 fans on it. I was worried it would start cracking within, so I poured room temperature water into the storage container basin in which I had the mold sitting in the event of a leak to help work as a heat sink. It cooled things down and the mold felt about 85% hard a few hours later without further disaster. At the time when I realized it was almost hard, I panicked again and ran to get the next 2″ pour ready so that it could cure before it hardens completely since I couldn’t sand between layers. Well, I poured it and thought all was fine. I slowed down the fans a bit thinking OK now it’s just a short pour again. Well 3 hrs or so later, I walked in and saw that it heated up so much it warped the acrylic even more and even some of the original pour on the bottom shrunk a bit. The acrylic glass cracked and resin poured out of 2 walls into the water-filled basin (WHAT a pain in the butt clean up job that was).

So this is where I am now — I was able to remove the mold from the deep storage container and put it on the lid. As you can see from the photo, the resin leftovers around the bottom edge are likely to cure this to the lid. How can I salvage this project? My only thought was to remove it from the mold, sand it down, clean it, then pour a 2″ pour into an identical mold and slowly lower the project into that so it can fill in all the edges again. Would that work? Also, any tips for safely removing this from the acrylic mold? I ordered some chisels and paint scrapers to try to get it off when I split the acrylic box walls. Is there an ideal timing to do this? instructions say at 72 hrs can demold and fully cured after 7 days.

Any advice would be GREATLY appeciated!!

[Author]

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