From Bean Bag Toss to Captain America Shield Toss Game

The whole point of this Instructable isn't to take a Captain America Shield and make it in to a bean bag tossing game. Its to hopefully inspire you to take something that you already have and make it your unique or add your own twist to it. We have made several versions of this same game using the original pieces but just changed a few things here and there and we can make it in to something different.

Growing up neither my wife nor I had a lot of birthday parties so now we like to go all out when it comes to our kids. Whenever we have birthday party for our kids we make it a themed party. We let our kids decide the theme and then we decorate accordingly to match the theme. The whole family gets involved because we like to try and make a lot of the decorations too or as many as we can. One of things we have come to be known for is out party games. My wife loves to have the kids play different party games for prizes. They play everything from sack races, to hula hoop contest, to limbo contest, these games are always a big hit with little and big kids alike. Since the party is themed we like to try and make the games themed as well. Sometimes its just a name change or we change one of the accessories of the game. For this build I decided to turn our bean bag tossing game in to a Captain America Shield tossing game.

You might be thinking I don't need to know how to reinvent a game for a birthday party but in this Instructable I will cover how to make a mold of a plastic toy then duplicate it. This could come in handy for replacing broken toy pieces or missing pieces.

Toy Shield

Dremel

Scarp wood or similar

Hot Glue Gun

Wooden Dowel

Casting Silicone

Pressure Pot

Razor Knife

Brad Nailer

Epoxy

Epoxy Dye

Stir Sticks

Sand Paper

Polishing Compound

This toy Captain America shield is from one of my son's action figures. He doesn't play with it anymore so he let me use it for this project. It has a small peg that I cut off using a Dremel with a cut off disc. I could have left this on but it would have made the mold more complex than it needs to be.

I took some scrap pieces of a white board, it can be any scrap pieces or even corrugated poster board will work for this part, and made a open faced box. I used hot glue to make sure I sealed up all the edges to prevent any leaks. The box has to be big enough for the shield actually it has to be bigger than shield you want to leave about a 1/4 inch of space all around the edge of the shield as well as the depth of the shield.

Since this is the model that I will use to make a mold of I needed to make a pour spout so I took a 3/8 inch dowel and cut it to fit the edge of the shield then I used a hot glue gun to attach it to the shield.

The shield needs to be suspended in the center of the box to make this work I drilled a 3/8 inch hole in the side of the box that would allow me to insert the 3/8 inch dowel. I secured it in place using hot glue.

Next I mixed up some two part silicone per the instructions and poured it in to the mold. You want to try and pour in the silicone from a corner and let it fill the all the voids slowly. Once the mold was full I put the entire box in my pressure pot. I pressured it up to 50 psi. and let it cure. This specific silicone cures in 30 minutes but I let it set for a few hours just to make sure it was set.

Once is was fully cured I released the pressure in the pot and then removed my mold from the box and used my razor knife to cut open part of the mold. This is were I realized I probably should have made a two part mold instead. When I cut out the shield my razor went in too deep and created an imperfection in the mold you can see this in the last picture. If I would have made a two part mold this would not have happened. As they say live and learn.

I needed to support the mold vertically so I used some scrap plywood and made a mold holder. This is nothing fancy just something that will hold the mold vertically.

It was time for my first attempt at making a duplicate shield. I used some Total Boat Epoxy that I had and mixed it per the instructions. I added some Red resin dye to the epoxy and made sure to mix it well. Then I poured it in to my silicone mold. I felt like the mold was a little loose in the wood mold holder so I shimmed it with a piece of cardboard. Then I placed it in my pressure pot and let it cure over night at 50 psi.

Once the epoxy cured I removed the duplicate shield from the mold and as you can see the shield had a large piece of flashing. This was partly due to my poor razor cutting skills of the mold that reared its ugly head in my finished piece. I had to use my razor to remove the flashing and then used some sand paper to smooth out the rough areas left behind.

I used some plastic polish and a buffing wheel to clean up the duplicate shield a little more, its not perfect but it works.

I also weigh the finished piece so that I know how much epoxy I need to mix for my next casting. This way I am not guessing and wasting epoxy.

For the cans that the shields will be tossed at I printed out some Hydra logos on white paper. I cut the paper to the size of the cans and tape them on using clear tape. We actually lost one of the cans from the original set so we substituted a soup can that is smaller and usually goes on top of the pyramid stack.

I repeated the process two more times and made a white and blue shield. Now we have a personalized game that fits our superhero theme. This may seem like a lot to go through for a kid's birthday party but its part of the fun for me. I have made several props and games for our kids birthday parties and they always make it a much more fun experience. All our family, friends, and neighbors have a great time at our parties. But most importantly our kids love it and always have a blast of a time.