Olifant: Trunk Fabrication

Pachydermos' trunk was a commercial vacuum cleaner hose that I covered in lambskin wrapped with waxed thread. I like it a lot, but I was thinking how cool it would be if I could build the trunk from scratch. I've decided that neoprene would be an ideal material to make a corrugated hose from (needed for the trunk to bend smoothly), and that is a material I can buy and cast into a plaster mold.

I thought and thought about how to make a steamy corrugated hose, and didn't really come up with much that would still allow it to bend easily, so I decided to put more emphasis on it graduating from a larger diameter to a smaller. After some experimenting I came up with the model above built from laser cut acrylic sheet mounted on a bolt.

To smooth out the surface and to fill in the cracks I've coated it with urethane resin, letting it build up in the recesses.

Over that I've brushed a layer of casting latex, which will make it easier to free from the rigid plaster mold, because it will have a little give.

And here I've started laying plasticine against the bottom half of the model to form one of the two mold halves. Next step will be to pour plaster over the top half.