The excess silicone left in the pour tube will be trimmed back, disguised during the seaming process and eventually covered in hair.
After drilling some bleeders to allow air to escape from the cavity, I filled each ear with silicone and let them totally cure before putting the core and mould together. This was just to make sure the ears filled properly - because of their complex shape, there was lots of areas for the air to get trapped if they had been filled up at the same time as the rest of the cast.
This image was taken just after I'd finished pouring the silicone. You can see how the Platgel has made it to all of the bleed holes and the next image shows air bubbles in the silicone rising out of the bleeders as well.
After the silicone was fully cured (checking the state of the exposed Platgel in the funnel), the funnel and tube was removed, the excess silicone was cut down to ease de-moulding. I decided to de-mould the face first - because of the slight translucency of the GRP mould, it's possible to see the pinkiness of the Platgel from the outside. This was useful when pouring the silicone because I could see where it was travelling through and filling the mould. I made sure to take the screws out of the eye blanks and teeth unit so they didn't get yanked out of the face when de-moulding - they might've actually stopped me from being able to take the mould off the face.
The chest and neck piece of the mould was the last piece to remove but because of the vacuum created by the silicone I had to split the Platgel skin up the back with a scalpel and use the core to push the chest piece away. This is why I created keys in the core so if I needed to do this, the silicone skin could locate back onto the core perfectly. Here are images of the head and torso straight out the mould...
