Save my sanity (Whats left of it)!

[larryfroot]

Hello people.

My first post apart from introductions and typically for me and forums it starts with a request for help. However I am likely to be hanging around for a while (I promise, deodorant and clean undies at all times) as I do not generally meet crafty people and am sure there is much in my work and experience that can prove useful to others as well. Not including medication .

Right then...I have undergone a learning curve. Steep and high it was. As a souvineer of my efforts I have a LOT of cured silicone that represented the best ideas I had at the time...the project has been an ongoing evolution of mould construction amidst other things. There must be around three hundred quids worth of the stuff, just sat there. Now I can re-use it by chopping it up into very small bits.

This is where the fun begins. I popped a lump of it into a food processor...instead of chopping it up into little bits it simply bounced around the lump of silicone. I even thought I heard it laughing at me through the noise of the machine.

I tried grating it. Silly move, I knew it wouldn't work, and it didn't.

I enquired about one of those garden waste machines...chuck branches in one end and woodchips spit out at the other...but seems like it snaps, breaks and mashes as much as actually cut. And you can't snap silicone.

So now I am looking to cut it by hand. Big blocks of it into tiny little bits......it will take me at least a week of proper long days spent in a world that has shrunk to little bits of chopped up silicone...hour after hour...day after day...I would like to forgo thr experience, but theres too much money locked away in it.

So can anyone save my sanity by suggesting ways and means to convert blocks of silicone into tiny bits of silicone? And please feel free to be silly as well...humour more than welcome in my drudge fuelled life at present. At least I can hold a party when its over...and I am on day release from the local psychiatric unit....

[Peter]

Welcome to the forum..........................you're going to fit right in!

[0103media]

How about one of them ?

[EMEvans]

Chainsaw.................................just a thought.

[larryfroot]

Thank you for the picture of the grater! Does anyone know of a grater sharpening service? There must be a little man somewhere who sharpens graters?!!!? No?

....goodness me, what an opportunity for someone to leap in and corner the market in grater repairs and sharpening! The heck with it! Crafts? Nah! I'm off to sharpen a grater and earn my fortune! As soon as I've finished watching this paint dry.



A chainsaw? tell you what....I stand there with a chainsaw, you throw the silicone and I will do my best with mighty swipes with it. I haven't killed myself in a bizzare chainsaw incident for oooh ages!

[0103media]

Airplanes ?

If you inserted under the skin then went on a plane it might just go bang no ?

[[email protected]]

What about a chunk of TNT!!! Just remember to stand well back and use it in a well ventilated room!

Pauline

[Peter]

Three toed sloth - never fails.

[JBJB]

What about a (clean) cement mixer?

I'm sure on those "how do they do that?" programmes that are on satelite tv all the time they break plasticky things in a roundy-roundy machine....?

[larryfroot]

sadly no amount of breaky break will worky work.

for silicone is a bouncy thing...

I think the force of a jumbo jet should achieve something. However I can just see my epitaph; He died to save some money from advice given by somebody who now says "I was only joking officer"

I could train up a troope of chimpanzees, however it would be an insult to their intelligence to employ them in the task that awaits me...

[Tip Top]

I presume that it will cut if used with the right tools?

Well, what about taking it to either a woodworking or steel machinery place and ask nicely to see if it will cut? Or even a sign making company - there is one opposite where I work and I can see right into their workshop from my window and they cut big chunks of plastic (ok, its thinner than what I think your lump of silicone will be but it may work) and it could save your life!!!!

Or am I being too boring??!!

[swirlyarts]

You can borrow my children - they can break anything!!

Welcome to the forum by the way - we will try to save your sanity but something tells me you are in the wrong place!

[[email protected]]

[quote=swirlyarts;45891]You can borrow my children - they can break anything!!



Pauline

[larryfroot]

Hmmm....sheet metal people, the guys who make jam jar lids and such like...they have guillotines...but the time it would take to cut the stuff up into tiny bits would make the process hideously expensive. Thats part of my problem...if there are people with the right machines out there, then possibly by the time they have completed the task and charged me for it I may as well purchase more silicone!

It was a long shot...I think I will meditate beforehand to reach a higher plane of numbness and get my trusty scalpel out and think of all teh fantastic huge moulds I will be able to make very cheaply using the little bits thus manufactured. I just hope it doesn't make my squint permanent.

Used to work with sheet metal. There were all these guys walking around with missing fingers. Really. I didn't last long!

[Apple Tree Crafts]

Um......

....how about one of those electric carving knives? They use a two-blade sawing motion which might help with the bounciness.

I think that, no matter how you go about it, it's going to be horribly tedious.

At least you can take a break and come and let off steam on the forum.

Hello, by the way, and sorry I can't be of more help.

Is this silicone the reason behind the 'froot'?

One more sugesstion...leave it as it is and ask the Tate Modern if they are interested. Write a piece of blurb and give it a deep and meaningful name.

Jules