Twenty-four questions about silicone moulds, answered clearly.

Not as a minimum unit count. We will make one mould if that is what your job needs, and many of our projects start exactly there. The practical limit is engineering time: designing a tool, choosing a material and cutting a split line takes roughly the same amount of work whether you need one mould or six. With a single tool, you cover all that work yourself, so the price per mould falls sharply after the first. If you are working to a budget, tell us in your first email. We will explain what fits within it, rather than quoting for something you cannot use.

If you can, send us the part itself. If that is not possible, photographs with a rule in the shot, a rough sketch showing the important dimensions, and a sentence explaining what you will be casting into the mould and how often will give us a useful starting point. CAD is welcome but not required. Around half of the quotes we prepare arrive without it. The most useful information you can give us is the cast material and the temperature it goes in at. These details determine the silicone before anything else. If the geometry needs to be created, scanning or reverse engineering can produce it. We will tell you which approach your part needs.

The lead time depends far more on the route than on our queue. A hand-made or cast silicone tool taken from a master you already own is usually the quickest option. If a master pattern needs to be designed, printed and finished first, that adds another stage. Compression and injection tooling is a different level of work again, because steel has to be cut and proved. We quote a lead time for your specific job in writing before you commit. We prefer to give you a date we can hold rather than an overly optimistic one. If your deadline is genuinely fixed, tell us early. It can sometimes change the route we recommend.

Here is how we handle it. If we make a dimensional mistake, we correct it at our cost. That is what the warranty is for. If you change your mind about the shape, wall thickness or branding, that is a revision. We price revisions honestly and clearly rather than hiding the cost. The best approach is to sample early, while the tool is still inexpensive to alter. That is why we recommend getting a first-off part in your hands before making a multi-cavity version. Nobody wants to discover a design problem after eight cavities have been cut.

On the drawing, we include enough draft (a slight taper) for the part to release. Flexible silicone is forgiving, which is why decorative parts can use walls that would jam in a steel tool. Straight walls still drag on every pull, though, and across a run that means significant labour and rejects. Where your design allows, we taper vertical faces and mark this on the drawing. Undercuts are usually fine, which is one of the advantages of a rubber tool. A modest undercut can be flexed past, while a deep or wrapped undercut needs the mould to split around it or use a separate insert. The question is what each option costs per pull, so we price them side by side.

It matters a great deal, and getting it right is one of the most common things to get wrong on a self-made mould. If the walls are too thin, the tool bows under the weight of the cast. Your parts can then come out fat in the middle and out of square. If the walls are too thick, you pay for silicone that does nothing except slow the cure and make the mould awkward to handle. Even thickness matters more than absolute thickness. Uneven walls flex unevenly, and that shows on the part. For brushed-on work, a rigid mother mould provides the support you need without the cost of extra silicone.

We propose the split line, and you approve it. Every split line leaves a witness mark, so we position it where your customer will not see or feel it: under a base, along a natural edge or inside a rim. When the line is placed for the mould maker's convenience rather than the product, the finished part usually needs trimming. That adds a labour cost that never goes away. If your part has a decorated face, tell us which face it is. That one detail can change the whole tool layout.

Yes, it is a large part of what we do. A physical sample can answer questions about surface, draft and release faster than a drawing. If you need the geometry, we scan and rebuild the part in CAD, correcting what should be corrected rather than faithfully copying the wear and shrinkage of the original. A scan is a starting point, not a finished model. Anyone who tells you a raw scan is production-ready has not tried it. If no master exists, we design and make one, then keep it on record. That means any replacement tool can be taken from the original rather than from a worn part. We will only copy a part you have the right to have copied.

The starting point is engineering time, followed by material. If you supply the master, a simple block mould mainly needs silicone and a couple of hours. Add a designed split line, registration, inserts, vents or a mother mould shell, and the work becomes more about thinking, drawing and bench work. That is where more of the cost goes. After that, the main factors are part size, because silicone is sold by weight; cavity count; the grade, since food-capable and high-temperature materials cost more; and whether a master pattern has to be made from nothing. We itemise the quote so you can see which of those levers is worth pulling.

The price of a mould on its own tells you almost nothing about whether a job makes sense. A cheaper tool that needs trimming on every part, or fails after a few hundred pulls, can cost you far more over a year than a properly specified one. The useful comparison is the tooling cost divided across the run you actually expect, plus the labour per pour and the reject rate. We quote this way because it is the only comparison that holds up during a real production week. It can also show that a job is not worth tooling at all.

Sometimes, yes, and we'll tell you when that's the case. If you want a plain votive, a standard loaf shape or a generic sphere, and what matters is what goes into the mould rather than the shape itself, a stock mould is cheaper and available immediately. What it cannot do is carry your branding, fit your oven, match your cavity spacing or be replaced like for like in two years if the supplier has changed its range. Most people who arrive with a catalogue mould have already redrawn their product to fit someone else's tool. That usually becomes frustrating when production volumes increase.

Sometimes, a bespoke mould is not the right choice yet, and we prefer to tell you early. Tooling only pays back over a production run. If you are testing a shape on a handful of units, buy stock, sell some and come back to us when you know the product is real. Bespoke tooling earns its place when the shape is the product, the release is fighting you or you are trimming every casting by hand. If the arithmetic is not there yet, we will suggest what to make in the meantime and explain roughly what volume would change the answer.