Been experimenting with making milk plastics. (Surprisingly cheap and easy. Takes about 15 minutes to make a batch.) Most online instructions result in making stuff that looks like squeezed and dried cottage cheese. But I found I guy in the UK who actually knew what he was doing, and got a “real” plastic out of it. He recommended a book from 1907 on making casein products. These pictures are from my second and third attempts after reading the book and running a few experimental chunks using different methods. The refining and filtering and removing of fats in the book is all negated if you use skim milk, which makes things a lot easier. It’s basically heating skim milk till steaming, mixing in a very small amount of dilute citric acid to pull some curd out, reheating and repeating until it drops clear. Doing that avoids using too much acid and getting very small chunks which are hard to knead under heat until the proteins link.

It cures by drying, and goes from opaque to clear/translucent in about a week. It’s easily carved and polished. The shot of the three samples is a yellowish “plain” one, an attempt at a “marbled” one using activated charcoal (the best black pigment I had available) and smaller one that I tried an alcohol cleaning step on. It caused the kneaded casein to go from a bubblegum-like consistency to little granules that wouldn’t rejoin. Heating and kneading again in the whey restored texture, more or less. Will be interested in seeing if it changes color or anything. There’s a few shots of Beth holding the first successful piece. It started as a ball, flattened a bit under its own weight and distorted a lot while shrinking. You can see some cracking/glazing that might have been from drying.

The last photo is day 2 of drying, showing the ring of translucent/cured plastic forming.

So! Uh, yeah. Super long post, but fun stuff to mess with in spare time. Might try and use it in making some of the Symbiosis props. Fun fact: most (or at least a high percentage of plastics made prior to WWII were made from milk. )