Now I can actually feel that the container has gotten warm and that friction caused by the mixing is also going to speed up the cure of the silicone RTV compound.  You might think this is going to be messy to clean up but basically you just wait until everything is cured and it will peel away very easy so easy enough to clean up the instruments that we use for mixing and the bowls that we use to mix it in.  It's very frothy like a milkshake right now a lot of air and you're going to be suspicious that it won't cure under pressure but I guarantee that it will.  From here I want to mold I want to pour into the mold frames.  And because I've got the bar in each of these frames it's going to take me a little bit longer to fill so I'm going to fill to the top of the glass, move on to the next frame, fill to the top of the glass, then wait for it to settle, and finish.   I'm trying to avoid getting any silicone on the rubber bands.  It won't hurt anything on the outside of the mold frame but the silicone will react with the sulfur and the rubber bands and they'll be goo and you'll have to throw them away and do a little bit of cleanup around the glass.  So if you can avoid getting the silicone onto the rubber bands you'll be better off.  

So I've given the silicone a little bit of time to settle down.  I see that my two on on this end are fine they're full.  There will be a slight reduction in height as the bubbles are crushed out of the silicone but this should only drop perhaps an eighth of an inch for most of the mold frames and not really of much concern.  If you do this with larger mold frames though I would suggest realizing that it's going to drop down a lot more when the bubbles get crushed out.   I prefer to use a plastic spatula now the more expensive ones are all made out of silicone and the silicone will bond with the silicone so I'm using a very very inexpensive cheap plastic that will not the silicone will not adhere to it.  It'll make the cleanup very easy I'll simply peel the silicone off of this when I need to get prepared to use it again.  

Okay you see now that we've filled up all our mold frames and you can see that there's a lot of air in them.  Now again either the NoVac unit, the silver bullet, or the Firefly is going to crush the bubbles until they dissolve and you're going to doubt me until you see the final results.  There is only one exception.  If you have a ring like this where there's a dome and there's no way for air to pass through it you may end up getting a trapped air bubble underneath the dome of the ring. So just keep in mind this system will work fine for anything that's not a closed dome.  You can easily take after you've mixed the silicone if you have the capability of vacuuming the air out and then pouring it into the mold frame.  However if you do that you just want to keep in mind that you do not have to vacuum it again once it's inside the mold frame.  That's what creates a mess and it's a waste of silicone.  So now I've got my six mold frames filled with silicone into the Firefly unit and I'm going to plug the lights in to show you that the lights are going to come on.  Now the lights are not doing anything for curing the silicone other than providing a little bit of gentle heat and again that's going to reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit inside which just turned out to be the exact perfect temperature for curing silicone and not causing the silicone to shrink at all.  The NoVac unit is very much the same as this unit but there are no lights in that unit.  So it would just be a container like this.  You could fill a lot of molds in.  If you have the ability to wait and do it overnight, the NoVac is fine and cheaper than the Firefly.  But the Firefly unit will everything.   I'm going to seal it nice and tight, going to make sure the bleeder valve is tight, and now I'm going to put air pressure on it from compressed air that's from our compressor.  Now you can cure the silicone with as little as 15 PSI or one bar of pressure, although I prefer to use 30 PSI or two bars of pressure.  And you can see if we look on the gauge we're just a little over 30 PSI or two bars.  Now I'm not going to be sure exactly when the silicone is done so I'm going to have this little trick of putting some of the silicone right on the outside of the container.  In about an hour and a half I'm going to come by and check that silicone and when it's almost done then what's inside is done because it's warmer on the inside of the Firefly unit than it is on the outside.  So let's pay attention and make sure that we've got a time that we can observe.  Okay I'm at about 1:54, a little under two o'clock I'm going to check back in about an hour and a half and see how our silicone is doing.   One thing I want to remind you of is always check on the Firefly, the bleeder screw.  That's going to let you know that there is in fact pressure that's been built up in the tank.  We don't want to do all this work only to find out that we were letting air escape.  So I got a nice hiss coming out of it that means there's pressure inside and we'll check back in in about an hour and a half.

Okay so we've had the silicone into the Firefly unit now for about an hour and a half.  It's 3:31.  Te power has remained on throughout the entire period of time to generate a little bit of heat that's necessary to cure the silicone faster than overnight which is standard curing time.  And again the overnight curing isn't going to hurt anything or the little bit of heat is not going to hurt anything.  It's just that if you overheat the silicone you may find that the cavity has shrunk and that's what we're trying to avoid.  Regardless, always remember this must stay under pressure the entire time you're carrying the silicone and if you get in a crunch and you want to plug this in for an hour and then let it finish overnight you can do that but remember pressure on all the time.