How to Mix Lamination for Prosthetics

Video Transcript

"TONY KAPECHUK: Hi, my name is Tony. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'll be showing you how to turn this check socket into a laminated definitive prosthesis. Now, we're ready to soak our next PVA bag. We'll let it soak for about three to six minutes and we'll just wrap it up, like so. This will help soften up the bag and it will be easier to apply. All right, our second PVA bag should be ready. Go ahead and dry any excess water off this bag just like the first. And we'll apply it in the same manner, making sure the seam is in the back of the prosthesis. Give it a little stretch up top and we're ready to tape it off to our funnel. All right. We used just a regular soda or tea bottle here. This will act as a funnel that we can introduce our resin into our lamination. Go ahead and tape that off securely. Now, we can go ahead and tape off our lower section of the bag. The hole I mentioned earlier that we didn't want to tape over comes into play now. We want to make sure we've got some kind of soft material over this hole that will prevent our bag from sucking in and sealing off the vacuum. We'll be laminating this prosthesis under about 20 to 25 pounds of vacuum here. We'll be using a modified epoxy acrylic resin. However, there are several other epoxy resins on the market, use whatever one best suit your needs. We'll use about three quarters of a cup of resin for a job of this type. We'll be adding some standard Caucasian pigment to help give our prosthesis some color. Typically, 3% is needed. It's really important to mix this well. Now that we've got our desired color, we can go ahead and add the promoter. This is what will actually set the resin off and make it hard. Typically, you want to use one scoop of promoter for every 100 grams of resin. I've got about 500 grams of resin in this cup so I use about five to six scoops. Usually, one scoop for every 100 grams used. You want to make sure this is mixed well and you want to mix it until you see no little crystals floating in it."