After making the dam around the tool, I decided to use Araldite (5 minute epoxy resin) to glue each tile in place. This way they wouldn't move when the dental stone was poured onto them.
Using a suggestion by Carey, I taped the entire tool to my orbital sander. This makes the dental stone flow into every nook and cranny, and should float air pockets to the surface. Semi hard dental stone turns liquid under this agitation. BTW, a suggestion if you try this method. Tape the back of the tool which has got three holes drilled in it. I forgot and the dental stone went everywhere!!!!!!!! Ah well, I'll take more care next time.
This shows the finished tool. A day or so to cure and I'll try it out.
While waiting for the bases of my new tools to be turned up, I decided to try a little experiment with the 5" and 6.4" tile on edge tools. Since both of them had great trouble spinning correctly, I decided to epoxy tiles in the conventional horizontal pattern to these 2 tools. The 5" had tiles araldited to them with no channels in it. The 6.4" had the tiles left attached to the backing net and I used liquid nails (epoxy?) to glue them down. The results and pictures are below. Any comments will be appreciated.
This is the 5" tool. It was trimmed round using a diamond edged wheel on an angle grinder. This made short work of making the tool circular. After this, the bugger still wouldn't spin correctly. It will now be used for someone to use hand grinding.
This is the 6.4" tool before grinding the edges round with the diamond wheel. After the 5" failed to spin correctly, I assumed this would not work either. I thought "Bugger It!" Nothing ventured, nothing gained so I put this on the machine with all those overhanging tiles (definitely not symmetrical and balanced). Running low on #80 grit I used #60 grit to see if it worked. It spun beautifully!!!!!!!! I was amazed to see the thing spinning with no grabbing as the water and grit wore down as well.
This is another view of the beastie! Definitely not circular! I'll trim it up later and see if it still spins when round and with the channels filled with dental stone. Should be interesting to see.
