FreeShip- Sculptor's Orange Sheet Wax, FLXwax, Medium (Hardness vs Flexibility)- (Prompt rebate on orders with 3 or more FreeShip items!)

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We've tried to be accurate, but as clear as possible in this description. If you want information before you buy, give this long description a read. We realize it's very long and would suggest you scan it first and try to find specific info you need. Then give that area a careful read. I should point out that although this is a sheet wax, its specific properties allow it to be useful for other wax jobs. The main properties of being somewhat hard, non sticky when warm, and softened at low temperatures allow some special effects. One is to pour molten sheet wax over a thin polymer film surface to create various topographic landscapes in miniature through buckling of the film. Another is pouring molten wax into a coolant liquid (water being the obvious choice). The low melting point and "paste" range make this wax especially suitable for that. You will get long, highly ornate textures or flat alien-like landscapes. Temperatures used for special effects are crucial for repeatability. If you want to see examples of "special effects", there's a post in our blog that has multiple pictures. The number of effects are much larger than the number of examples shown. There's also additional description on these special uses at the very bottom of this description, below the dashed line. Note that this has been invented and re-invented several times. It goes back to the 1970's when it was used to make "baroque candles".

The title says "Medium (Hardness vs Flexibility)" What does that mean? Compared to a modeling wax it is much harder, but compared to a true carving wax it is much softer. The flexibility is a little harder to pin down, because it varies so much with temperature and thickness (and size of the sheet). A "thick" sheet of moderate size may not be flexible at room temperature, but a "thin" sheet of the same size and same temp may be pretty flexible. More specific info on that is below.

This wax is meant to be flexible at conveniently low temperatures so it can be manipulated comfortably with fingers and allows it to have a low heat source when working with it. It's also specifically meant to not to be sticky like most other flexible waxes.
It's NOT comparable to the 4" x 4" soft translucent sheet wax labeled and sold by Rio Grande called Modeler's pink or green sheet wax (available in 16 to 26 gauge). Wax that soft is better at bonding to itself but is tacky (which is intended). It is made for a completely different purpose and it is much softer than our sheet wax.

It goes without saying that a medium which is flexible like clay or wax has the advantage of being able to be fashioned into hollow 3-D shapes, pottery or sculpture for clay, and sculpture or ornamentation for wax (when transformed into metal by investment casting).
When building up hollow shapes for sculpture, a "armature" made of wadded newspaper can be used so wax sheets can have a form to be wrapped around. Using paper which burns will allow the finished sculpture to be investment cast into metal. The paper doesn't add much ash when the wax is eliminated during mold burn-out in the oven. Do not use "shiny" paper as it's coated with kaolin which will definitely not burn out. Another armature material that will allow investment casting is rigid polystyrene foam. You can buy it in spheres or cubes at Michaels if you have one in your neck of the woods. It will also disapear during wax burn-out.
If you're going to make a mold of the finished wax sculpture you're free to use any material for an armature. Wire mesh: chicken wire, or hardware cloth is a good choice. It would work better because it would be much stiffer than the newspaper armature. You can fashion a wider variety of shapes from wire mesh. You also don't have to join the edges of sheet wax together, you can just overlap them and spot weld them at a few places with a propane torch held far enough away to melt the overlap. A finished sculpture can be made from such a hollow shape with very few additions. It can also be made into an intermediate form that can be further worked. Some suggestions: it can be built up in certain areas either with solid or hollow low additions, or have multiple sheet or tubular forms attached, or join multiple hollow shapes of about the same size.

All waxes are SO dependent on temperature. Manufacturers formulate their waxes to have specific physical properties at both room temperature and elevated temps (melting point for instance). A wax formulated to be a hard carving wax at room temperature, and hold sharp details will disapoint a customer living in a warm climate who is used to higher room temperatures because the wax will be softer and not hold detail as well.
What IS the definition of room temperature anyway? If you include Florida and Alaska and the people there who are used to outdoor temperatures, you may get room temperatures from around 65 F to 80 F. People working with specific types of wax will need to take temperatures up or down to get maximum advertised qualities from a wax. Probably the average room temperature lies between 70 and 75 F. 70 to 72 F may be an even tighter range.
A space heater in a small room will work to bring the temperature up for those in Alaska and air conditioning is an easy solution for those Floridians used to temps in the 80's.

I've used an infrared gun thermometer to measure the temperatures cited below. A traditional thermometer may not have the ability to measure temperature changes as fast but you can still use the temps given as a relative guide. The flexible temperature range of this wax is 80+ F to 90- F. You can work outside that range but you may have problems with the wax being too weak in the 90's. However, going in the other direction, you can get away with temps in the 70's F if you use thinner wax or if you work in larger scale where radius of bends are generally lower. The wax is hard enough at temps in the 70's to hold it's shape. It depends on the thickness of the shapes, but at 1/16" to 1/8" it only needs to be warmed to approximately 75 F to 80 F degrees. It can be heated with light bulbs of varying sizes if you have goose necked lamps or the clamp-on lamp type with reflectors. The light will keep your wax continuously warm as you shape it.

Wax thicknesses between 3/32" and 1/8" are especially good to work with, and the thinnest sheets we have are in that vicinity of about 0.110" or 2.75 mm thick. They work well at room temps previously mentioned. Some tacking by quick welds with a heat pen will hold joints in place if some sharper bends are tending to spring back. Thinner wax sheets also have the advantage of keeping an even temperature throughout their thickness. Wax that is 3/8" or above will tend to be warmer on the outside and colder in the center. When bent, it will develop stress cracks easier.

The topic of melting sheet wax to make your own custom thicknesses (which is much more economical than having us do it) is fairly detailed. This sheet wax starts to melt at about 120 F. This would be called it's melting point or "solidus" point. It's the point (or range if your measurements are not laboratory quality) below which it's completely solid. Going back the other way, from a liquid to a solid, it will just begin to congeal in the mid
120's F (between 125 and 120 F it starts to become a gel). That would be called it's congealing point or "liquidus" point. It's the point (or range) above which it's completely liquid. The temperatures between the solidus and liquidus lines, when a mixture is part solid and part liquid is called its "melting range". The melting range of a single material can be used as a guide to tell how pure it is. If it's a small number (1 or 2 degrees) the substance is pretty pure. This sheet wax has a pretty narrow melting range.
This wax will be pourable at 170 F to 190 F. That means you can use a double boiler to melt it, always safer than heating a pan on a direct heating element. If you're pouring a thin sheet of wax you should use 200 to 210 F to pour so it will cover the pan you're pouring into evenly. Places like Walmart have low cost Teflon coated cookie or pizza pans which work well. You don't even need a release agent (if a sheet of wax doesn't pop right out of the pan, put it in a freezer for 30 minutes or so. It will release much easier from the pan). To ensure you get a even pour you should preheat the cookie or pizza pan to around 220 F. You should use a level to get the cookie pan to make a sheet of wax that's of consistent thickness. If you don't have a level, keep some shims like popsicle sticks or just folded paper towels nearby so you can eyeball how thick the wax is on the sheet when still molten and adjust it it with shims under it until it looks fairly level. Use the higher temps mentioned above to keep the wax molten so you have time to adjust it with the shims. Use gloves of coarse, at those high temperatures.

Here's a listing of some of the states of this wax at various temperatures, taken when the wax is cooling from liquid to solid:
- At 115 F it's paste-like and you can work it in your fingers. It will be a little sticky at that temp, but it depends on what temperature your fingers are (it varies!). The longer your work it around, the warmer your fingers will be and it will start sticking to them.
- It's still a little malleable paste down to about 90 F.
- It goes from paste-like to a solid at about 100 F

We do not recommend using a microwave oven to melt wax or even to just soften it because of the fire danger if you were to mistakenly set it for 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds and walk away from it. Also, if you are heating small jewelry or ornament sized pieces of sheet wax over and over, turning it on and off for 30 minutes, that's akin to running it empty. Running a microwave empty will burn out the magnetron and the microwave is ruined.
Interestingly, the heat from your closed hand (for small work) can get pieces around 3/16" thick or less up to a temperature of about 83 to 85 F and they will take relatively large radius bends at that temp (with such small hand sized pieces). The smaller the radius bend (a "sharper" bend) the thinner the wax should be. You will get a feel for what you can and cannot do as you work with the wax.
Perhaps the best heating solution of all is this one:
If you have a couple of gooseneck lamps or clamp-on lights with reflectors, you can warm a work table at elbow length in front of you as a warm work area at a temp of your choosing. The light will keep your work continuously warm as you shape it.

One disadvantage of flexible wax is that doesn't stick to itself at room temps or when warmed (unless it's a type that's very soft). The flip side of that is it also doesn't stick to your fingers when working in the 80's with it, which is a joy. I've worked with very small things (fine jewelry waxes) and large things (20 lb microcrystalline wax investment casting projects). The worst kinds of malleable/modeling media are sticky wax projects (including all kinds of water or oil based clays and bunches of wax types). There are standard tricks to dealing with it, though.
But having said that, it does introduce an inconvenience when using this wax and wanting to join it to another piece. You're stuck with "wax welding" it. As with the sticky wax there are tricks to dealing with that, too. If you've welded or soldered metal, you'll have no trouble doing the same with wax. You cut a slender "welding rod" of the sheet wax and use either a mini torch or a mini heat gun. The tiny torch flame works the best because you can direct the heat at the precise location it needs to be without heating up the whole wax section. You'll need to read up on the process or just dive in and practice welding some scrap pieces together. You use your wax rod as a filler because the pieces won't fit closely together (neither do you want them to). If it's in a non-critical area or the outside of a convex surface, you just weld one side. If it's a projection from another wax shape you'll need to weld both sides.
There is yet one other technique/tool that makes pretty quick work of welding/joining two pieces of sheet wax together and that's a "wax pen". It works best for spot welds. There are numerous models and sizes on the market and you buy the one best suited to the size of the wax parts you mostly work with. The best configuration is a working tip (that part that gets hot) that is a "U" shaped piece of wire. The width of the "U" and the thickness of the wire determines the "size" of the wax pen. The very smallest ones for jobs like working the ends of prong stone setting on fine jewelry have wire sizes about 0.25 mm diameter (30 gauge) with distances between the wires of 1 to 1.5 mm. There's a main heat control on the desktop unit with a holder for the pen itself. Most useful is a foot pedal that you can control heat times to the tip in fractions of a second by tapping the pedal and making joints in tiny areas that are almost invisible. There are models in all sizes for welding moderately small to large wax object parts. Some are as large as wood burning "pens" (not nearly as hot though). The main advise I'd give is to get one that has that "U" shaped tip in whichever size you get. It's has several purposes but the main convenience is being able to have a tin of the wax type you're using nearby. You dip the heated "U" tip into the tin of wax, it melts a little ball (or "puddle") of the wax you need transferred to the object part you're welding within the "U". You touch it to the joint of the needed weld, melting the 2 sides of the oject part, and deposit the little ball of wax that's on the "U" tip into the weld area. You repeat this process as needed, back and forth, back and forth.
There is yet another major trick to welding the two pieces of sheet wax. It sounds counterintuitive but there's a product called "sticky-wax". At room temperature it's NOT sticky at all, but is hard. When melted by dipping or dripping it onto on side of the joint it becomes sticky, a kind of wax glue in other words, you quickly jam the other side into the still molten "sticky-wax". The two pieces of sheet wax can stay at room temperature. When the sticky wax cools the joint will hold them together. Obviously there are tricks to using it and there are different kinds of it, differing hardnesses and working temps (it is normally pretty hard but softer types are available). When cool, it will usually be harder than the surrounding sheet wax. I'd recommend doing some internet reading or youtube watching for working with it.
Another source of information that's easy to get to versus doing an internet search are the descriptions of our modeling waxes, especially the Yellow Light modeling wax. There's a lot of information about waxes in general in that description. The Blue Glacier modeling wax also has a lot of info that applies to this sheet wax, since Blue Glacier has the highest melting point of any of our modeling waxes and some matching temps to Orange Sheet Wax. Here are links to those two waxes:

Yellow Light Modeling wax:
https://northernweststuff.com/collections/waxes-modeling/products/freeship-sculptors-modeling-wax-3032

Blue Glacier Modeling wax:
https://northernweststuff.com/collections/waxes-modeling/products/freeship-sculptors-modeling-wax-2946

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This is primarily intended to be a sheet wax but because of its specific temperature range and properties at those temperatures it makes a good "special effects" wax.

If you pour this melted wax onto a polymer film (like the polyethylene that zip lock bags are made of, it will heat the film and cause it to buckle into interesting patterns. I've only tried it with polyethylene, but I have tried it with double thickness (a 2 sided complete bag) and 1 sheet (a bag torn open), and with bags of varying thickness (2 mil and 4 mil). Each of those examples gave me a different effect. I suspect that if the bag is put onto different surfaces (wood vs metal), it will heat and cool the buckling and wax into yet other effects. Another variable is how hot (and thus viscous) the melted wax is. I've used low temperature melted wax so I don't have to construct walls to contain the higher viscosity, higher temp wax. It cools and doesn't run all over the table that the bag is on. If the bag is placed at the bottom of a pan or glass tray, the walls are already there. The problem is that the wax will flow under the bag also, encasing it in wax. Using a complete bag with both sides intact and using contact cement to glue the bag to the bottom of the pan would hopefully prevent wax from flowing under the bag, at the same time leaving the top of the bag loose and free to buckle should work. Anther variable to get different effects would be trying different films such as: cellophane, very thin mylar (mylar is stiff), Cling Wrap (Saran wrap), Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC), polystyrene, and other more esoteric (and hard to find) films.

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Please note that the description below involves pouring molten wax into water, NOT the opposite of pouring water into hot liquid wax; that is dangerous. The water can cause hot wax to fly out of the pot. If the wax is very hot, close to flaming (or actually flaming), a spray of flaming wax can fly out of the pot.

This is primarily intended to be a sheet wax but because of its specific temperature range and properties at those temperatures it makes a good "special effects" wax. The effects depend on the temperature differential between the liquid wax and the water.
Needed:
A large bowl or small trash can filled with about 75 F water, an appropriate low melting point but viscous wax. Low viscosity wax like paraffin when completely melted will give more difficulties when attempting to achieve good effects. But experimentation is definitely needed when trying to get a specific effect.
Here are some generalizations (that may or may not apply depending on the effects you're trying to achieved).
-Cold water freezes the wax too quickly and prevents the development of easily visible folds and twists (the detail is too fine).
-Water that's close to the melting temperature of the wax will float on the surface of the water and can develop interesting flat sheets with the detail on the underside of the floating wax. Cooling of the water will freeze the details at a certain point of development.
-Temperature differentials that are just "right", in this case low but not low enough to allow molten wax sheets to float on the surface of the water will make large and not overly baroque or overly detailed shapes.
-Temperature differentials that are large (low temp water and high temp wax) are more difficult to achieve good results.

Reviews

Reviews (1)

Average:

May 3, 2023

Deffinetly a super hard yet rubbery wax. Good quality.

Nick