Molding a Hobby into a Business

One day when browsing YouTube, Shane Bulger, a CAD Designer at NDX Thayer, Mechanicsburg, PA, stumbled upon Adam Savage’s Tested, a series about fabricating replica movie props. In the episode he watched, Frank Ippolito, a special effects artist, was molding and casting a Star Wars lightsaber. Bulger, an art school graduate and a self-described “geek,” was intrigued by what he saw and thought he’d give it a shot. 

His first prop was a replica of an M-23 Katana shotgun from Mass Effect, a video game series. “The goal was to create it to scale from the game to real life; it’s two feet long by six inches wide and something that would fit with a six-foot-tall person in costume at a convention,” he explains. He carved a master model out of wood, then made a silicone mold with a fiber glass outer casing, cast it in resin and painted it. He enjoyed the process so much that with his next paycheck, he bought...