Five years ago, my life was completely different

My wife and I, we did the stupidest thing back in 2009: We chucked a lot of the stuff family, friends, neighbors, co-workers and strangers would have said "matters".

Actually, we chucked two things, but they were big ones. First, we sold the house, and we didn't have a new home to go to. Second, and much scarier to me, I quit my job. For 20 years I'd worked  as a journalist and I was good enough at it to keep going if I wanted, but still I quit and planned to be done with journalism for good ― and given the sad state of the industry, my prospects of finding a new job elsewhere weren't great anyway. Plenty of people who were good at journalism were out of work, and bluntly, they didn't have any skills that made them worth hiring for any other job.

Claying up a fish fossil for molding in Saskatchewan in 2012.

Our big plan was to move to the mountains with three things in our lives that truly did "matter": our kids.

We did this in what I'm forced to acknowledge was not the best way, with a fair amount of cash in the bank thanks to the home sale and some financial craziness, and practically no notion of how we'd get more money rolling in before we desperately needed it.

I had some vague idea that I might do freelance website development, maybe some writing, and I had a hope that I might find a part-time job at a Home Depot. I just assumed there would be a Home Depot in the area, just like I assumed there would be a Walmart. For what it's worth, there is a Walmart a little more than 20 miles from where we settled, but the nearest Home Depot is more than twice as far away.

Thing is, what I most wanted after two decades spent largely tapping on computer keyboards was to trade in my white collar for a blue one. I wanted to genuinely do things with my time and my body. I wanted to pick things up, move things around, interact with people in ways that weren't designed to get publishable information from them. I wanted to use tools that bent, lifted, drove and burned things.

I wanted, I told my wife, to be righteously tired at the end of my workdays, instead of just restless.

What I found was so unexpected, so cool, so everything I said I was looking for and more. Truthfully, some of  that "more" has included "exhausting" and "vexing", but everything worth doing is hard, right?

My full-time job since summer 2010 has been molding, casting and fabricating the skeletons of prehistoric creatures. In my own time, I mold, cast and sell monster model kits.

Are these the kind of things that make you go "Oooh"? They were for me, and I've encountered plenty of middle-aged men who'd trade their left nostril to be in my position. Maybe a few men and women of other ages as well.

"The Moldin' Years" will focus mostly on the things I've learned about making molds (particularly silicone molds, but latex molds will come up from time to time), resin castings and the like. I'll discuss some specific projects I've done, hoping to point out particular challenges I've encountered and how I worked around them. I'll talk about the tools I use from day to day, some of which I had to purchase, some of which I could have purchased but it made a lot more sense ― and cost a lot less ― to create my own. Occasionally I'll talk about myself, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum.

This will be a mishmash for a while, starting with entries discussing tools and then ... well, I haven't decided. I can't promise to present all this in step-by-step instructions. If you're in a hurry to learn how to make molds and castings, the best I can offer at the moment is the reminder that Google is your friend. There are some very good websites and books on the subject, which I'll get into down the road. I hope eventually to organize what I put down here into something more coherent, but that's going to take a while.

The trial-and-error path to making molds and castings is expensive, which "sticker shocks" many people out of even trying. Check out the price of a 5-gallon bucket of mold-making silicone if you don't know what I mean. I was lucky enough to be able to do that on my boss's time and dime, with plenty of extra help from long-distance friends who went out of their way to answer my questions. Now maybe that knowledge will be useful to someone else.

Want to ask a question, make a suggestion or call me a name? Please feel free to post them in the comments, or email me at resinbarbarian@gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting.

Todd