We challenged ourselves to make a silicone dildo. Now for the critical step: moulding the sex toy.
Previously, we thought about what kind of sex toy we wanted to create, and got the necessary equipment. He then 3D-modelled the mould, and then we printed it.
Moulding the sex toy: the decisive step
A lot of stress before starting: what if we messed up, and ended up with a formless blob instead of managing to make a silicone dildo like we’d hoped? Would the silicone manage to pour correctly into all the complex contours of our mould? Would bubbles ruin everything by causing lots of little holes in our dildo?
Finally, it’s possible to damage the mould during demoulding. And if that happened, we’d have to go back to the mould printing stage if our attempt failed.
So, it took us a few days to mentally prepare for this step.
Moulding the sex toy: preparing the liquid silicone
Silicone is bought as a two-part mix. The one we chose, Dragon Skin, is mixed in equal proportions. So, we didn’t need graduated containers for measuring. Two identically sized small glasses did the trick. During mixing, unless you want an all-white sex toy, you also need to add silicone dyes.
We wanted four different colours for our sex toy. So we needed one container per shade: purple, blue, white, and black. For this, we used ordinary glasses, which will now be reserved for DIY projects as they’re completely caked in silicone.
To mix it, most silicone moulding tutorials recommend a wooden spatula for each container. Not having any to hand, we improvised with what we had. As a spatula, we only managed to dig out some wooden skewers from our cupboard. After all, a skewer can be used to stir a cocktail, so it can stir other things, right?
Spoiler alert: a wooden skewer is not thick enough to mix silicone. So, we bundled several skewers together for each container to make them thick enough to be sturdy. And, for fear of running out of skewers later (I don’t know if you often think about buying more skewers, but we don’t), we broke them in half so as not to use up the whole packet. That was a bad idea: our beautiful silicone dildo almost ended up with splinters! The irony, when you think some people are afraid of finding them in wooden sex toys!
When moulding tutorials talk about “liquid silicone”, they’re being kind. In reality, it’s more of a very sticky paste, and still quite resistant when you mix it. However, you have to perfectly mix the colours and the two silicone components. Get ready for a bit of a wrist workout, and for once, I’m not talking about masturbation. In fact, many people advise splitting the mixture into several smaller containers, which are easier to stir.
When added to the silicone, the colours turn out paler than expected, especially the dark shades. The dyes come in small bottles, which you add drop by drop while continuing to mix until you get the desired shade. When it came to making the black silicone, it was a bit of a pain. Mixed with the silicone, the black dye formed a greyish colour that I tried my best to darken by adding more black dye and mixing in some purple.[1][2] The result is still very grey.
Moulding the sex toy: removing the bubbles
If bubbles form, they can cause holes in the sex toy. So they must be avoided.
To get rid of the bubbles, some tutorials advise tapping the bottom of the containers on the tabletop after mixing, and to wait a little… But not too long, watch out for the pot life!
For our part, we didn’t want to take any chances. Admittedly, according to its official website, Dragon Skin silicone is not supposed to require degassing. But we still opted for a cheap vacuum pump to remove the bubbles as much as possible. It’s not great, but given the number of bubbles it managed to extract, and the damage caused by the few bubbles that escaped the degassing, we didn’t regret our purchase.
Okay, so after that, you can’t mess up. You have to wait long enough to remove enough bubbles, but the silicone might start to cure if you wait too long.
Moulding the sex toy: pouring the silicone
You shouldn’t confuse “pot life” and “cure time” for silicone.
- Pot life is the time (from the moment you start mixing) before which the moulding absolutely must be finished. Once this time has passed, if you haven’t used it yet, the silicone will have hardened too much to be used.
- Cure time is the minimum duration you have to let the silicone cure in the mould before you can demould it.
As we’re beginners in silicone moulding, we chose one with a long pot life (45 minutes), just to be sure we had enough time for all the steps.
Once the bubbles were removed from the silicone, we began moulding the sex toy.
So we poured the silicone into the mould. Well, ‘poured’ is a bit of an exaggeration… The silicone is dense and very sticky, to the point that at the time, we were afraid we had waited too long. But it seems this is normal.
Because of the look of some sex toys with blended shades, we thought we’d be dealing with much more fluid pours. However, we were counting on playing with the way we poured the colours to try and create some kind of pattern on the sex toy. So the result was much less precise than expected. It actually turned out pretty well in the end, even if, colour-wise, the dildo’s look isn’t what we had envisioned.
We were also afraid we hadn’t prepared enough silicone. By a stroke of luck, we hadn’t measured, but we ended up with exactly the right amount.[3][4]
Moulding the sex toy: a concave base
Finally, before the silicone cured, we placed the small dome-shaped accessory we had planned for on the mould to get a concave base.
Moulding the sex toy: demoulding
Not wanting to risk demoulding the dildo too early, we left it to cure until the next day.
The final step of moulding the sex toy, then: demoulding it.
He took care of this part, using a kitchen knife as a lever to separate the two halves.
The mould was not damaged, it’s as good as new, so we can use it to make a second one, now that we’ve learned from the mistakes that caused us some hassle and resulted in a few small flaws.
And there you have it, our 100% home-made silicone dildo is ready! It has a few flaws which we’ll tell you about soon, but for a first attempt, we’re thrilled with the result. I’ve already used it, by the way, and I was also very satisfied with the result.
In the next article, we’ll show you a closer look at what the dildo we made looks like.
To be continued in the next episode.
Making a silicone dildo (6/6): Alva, the result
