Question: carving a bar of soap

[digitalarchivist]

I haven't received my M3 yet, so this is more of a general question: does anyone have any experience in carving a bar of soap?

I've already had a friend ask me to make her a stamp to emboss fresh-made soap (a hazard of buying a new CNC setup, apparently).  Apparently, most folks who do this carve a mold out of machinable wax, then cast the stamp using clearcast epoxy.

However, someone online (look here!) hand-carves cakes of soap and uses them for molds; it's cheap, easy to carve and easy to clean up the cast stamp afterwards.

Would anyone here have any experience carving a bar of soap on their M3?  Any ideas as to settings and mill?


Thanks!

[andrew]

If the goal is to cast an epoxy stamp from your soap engraving, why not skip the epoxy casting part and just mill the finished stamp out of wood, plastic, or aluminum?

[taal]

The stamp can be made of anything really, it doesn't need to be cast. I make my own soaps as well and I've never seen a stamp that wasn't wood.

As for actually carving soap? It would be possible, though messy. Newly cast soap is full of excess moisture and very soft (this is why stamping works), so the soap being carved away would probably liquefy fairly quickly. This isn't a hazard or anything, but you'll find soap drops everywhere once it all solidifies again

EDIT - I wanted to add a couple of other points. 

    - I could see carving a wax form in order to make a silicon mold (or molds) for production use, the silicon would come off easily when cured. Just mix the silicon, press the carved blank into it and voila, a reusable, custom soap mold. You could even make mulitples, trim them and attach them for a whole sheet of molds. (BTW, as I type this, I know I WILL be doing this, I've been wanting to try selling the soaps I make and this would allow me a great option for branding etc ) 

    - If you age the soap 4-6 weeks after making it could be more easily carved by the machine, but this is something you would only want to do as a one-off. It would make much more sense to create a mold like the point above if you need multiple units.  

[digitalarchivist]

Thank you both for he quick replies. I guess I was intrigued by the idea of carving soap to make a mold to mark the soap. It just sounds like fun.

And (just to be clear), I wasn't going to carve her handmade soap; I was hoping to use a bar of something like Ivory soap, plane and carve it, and use it as a mold for the clearcast. Just like your wax form idea, but with bubbles.

I hadn't thought about the mess - I might just stick to wax. I'll keep you posted.

[jules rosen]

Most soap takes 4 weeks to really cure hard .. Soapmakers who still use wood molds , use a release spray. Take a look at silicon molds available on ebay, amazon or aliexpress and you can see how detailed some are.