This week Neil gave the lecture on the Molding and Casting, by the end of lecture he gave all the instructions on materials, ways and techniques.
After the lecture of Neil, we also got the briefing and demo on the Molding and Casting part by Santiago Fuentemilla
Santi Fuentimella, giving a demo on Molding and Casting
Before the start of the task, I knew what I want for the task of this week. I wanted this week's task to align with my final project. So I chose "Wheel" be the model of my task for this week.
Well the first thing I done was to choose the model for the wheel, I do had the original wheel so I took all the parameters from there and started my working as keeping that wheel as the base model
I chose to work on solidworks as I haven't worked before on it so I want to learn to work on this as well. Creation of the model wasn't a big task, Solidworks is quite related to Autocad Fusion 360 so I didn't faced any challenge during the process of creation
Solidworks - Making Paramatric Design of Wheel
Once the parameters were already set, now it was time to extrude pull and extrude cut the important parts accordingly
Solidworks - Wheel Complete
Here are the solidworks files, which can be dowloaded for the wheel
Once I finished the working on the creation of part, now it was the time to make the mold of it, and after creation of it I found a few problems.
My mold had multiple points which can't be created from single side, it was the limitation of milling, even though I divided my mold in multiple parts it was still hard to make mold for it. So I had to change the design a little so it can be created from single side even after dividing it in 2 parts.
I imported the model in the Rhinoceros 3D to work on it for the creation of Mold.
Dividing the mold in 2 parts
Making the Mold using Boolean
Working on Mold
Working on Mold
Mold Ready
All the files of Rhino for the creation of Mold are here :
After I readied the mold, now it was time to prepare the Milling files of these. I used Roland Modela Player 4 to make the milling files so that I can mill my model.
I found one very interesting tutorial, it tells every and each step in very detail.
Setting Origin to Left Bottom
The first important step in this was to create the two files, one for Roughing and Other for the finishing
In roughing process, the majority of the unwanted material is milled out so that it is easier for the next step to follow
In finishing process, the remaining of the unwanted wax material is milled out to give the desired result of the mold
Starting Roughing Process
For roughing I chose the 3.18 mm tool, as it was much bigger tool and can clear the wax more faster and easily
Choosing the tool`
Selecting the area to be rough
Setting roughing parameters
Setting direction in which the milling will be done
Saving the Rouging Settings
This is done the roughing part, and it was the same for finishng part as well the only change was the change of the tool as I wanted my mold with more detail so I chose 0.79 mm tool instead of 3.18 mm
Selecting tool for finishng part
All the files for the Rouging and Finishing part of molding are here :
Once the necessary files were ready now it was the time to start the milling
After Roughing
After Finisihing
During the process of milling i find that my model is too small, it cannot be used for the final project. Still i went with it and now I have to improve the wheel model for my project.
Finally once I was done with the milling process now it was the time for getting ready to mold.
First of all I filled my model with water to check the volume required for the material to fill, the water weight was around 20 grams so I took double of it as material (Silicon) and put around 3-4 grams of Caterlyzer.
Once the chemical was ready, I poured it in the mold
The silicon material we used to create mold
Putting chemical in the mold
After putting material next step was to remove the bubbles as if any bubbles are left it will ruin my mold So I took the charge and put the mold with material on poured on under the vacuum to suck out all the bubbles slowly.
Removing bubbles
After the mold was ready now it was the time for create Cast from it.
The first thing was to measure the amount of the material which will be poured inside it, and secondary is the material which I am gonna use. For the test purpose I chose the plastic material. I wanted to create a plastic cast which I can later use to produce the wheel for the model of my project.
I used water to measure the volume of material
Measuring water
These are the materials which I wanted to use, there are two parts of this, Part A and Part B, which should be combined in 10:9 order respectively. After the ratio was ready I stir it for around 5 mins, as if I will stirr it more it was getting more and more sticky. So I poured the cast in my mold.
Materials
Pouring the Cast
After putting the Cast it was the same process of removing bubbles and so on.
Final Result
Well the output wasn't the desired result, I thought my result will be much better than this one, this one was rather elastic than the solid. I think I mistakenly added the wrong composition of the materials. May be some material was inserted more and thats why my result was not accurate. But none the less I learnt how I should and how I shouldn't do the the molds, atleast next time my results will be much better.
