QuietDom -> RE: Make your own silicone dildo? (4/19/2008 6:01:28 PM)
|
Any silicone, industrial or not, should be utterly harmless -- silicone is wonderfully inert stuff. The risks relate to other chemicals piggy-backing in your silicone. I've been looking into these sites with some interest, myself. Food and medical grade silicones are made by combining two different chemicals. Silicone results, and there are no by-products of any kind. Every batch must also be individually tested for purity. Skip the (expensive) test, and you have a lower-priced product that is functionally equivalent to the food/medical stuff. Industrial silicones like silicone caulk are "condensation silicones." The silicone is put into a workable, liquid state through the addition of some very nasty volatile organic compounds. In theory, these compounds evaporate out in the curing process, and leave harmless silicone behind. In practice, however, there is no way for the home user to be certain that all the nasty stuff is gone. The makerealsextoys site, however, offers the best method I've seen thus far to ensure that a condensation silicone cures "clean." The naptha that gets added to the mix (every bit as nasty as the other solvents, if not more so) should be the preferential solvent, and thus free up the original solvents to cure out faster. The naptha, in turn, will evaporate more quickly than the standard solvents -- causing the silicone to cure faster, but also greatly reducing the likelihood of any detectable amount of VOCs being left behind after a day or two. The method of applying the silicone in thin layers, rather than molding an entire object at once, also seems smart. The more surface area you have, relative to the volume of silicone there is to cure, the more efficiently the solvent should escape. I'm not quite convinced enough yet to start stuffing people with home-made silicone, but, once I have some more practice with this method, I plan to do further testing of the cured silicone. If the VOCs have indeed cured out, then, to my understanding, my home-brew silicone should have no smell, no taste, and not burn -- those are all well within my capacity to check.
|
|
|
|