Moulding and Casting

this week we were told to design a 3D mould then machine it then and cast parts from it. So i wanted to make a Emotion keychain as i thought it will be a nice mould to cast from it and giving them away as a present.

The Design

I started designing by getting an image of the Emotion i wanted to make. Exported the image to inkscape to trace the lines and turn the pixels into vectors. So i selected Path > Trace Bitmap then selected edge detection then i saved it as SVG.

Then i opened fusion360 and selected insert then SVG file and started cleaning and refining the sketch. After that i extruded the sketch as desired and added a chain hole. Then i saved the 3d file to stl and saved the plane sketch as dxf and opened it again in inkscape and exported to png files. first png image was the keychain body layer then the second png image was the face layer.

Milling Mould

Then i opened the fabmodules and selected make png rml and selected mill traces and set the offset to -1 to fill and i machined the body then repeated the same process with the face. i was milling the mould in 6mm black acrylic piece.

Casting the Mould

After the mould was finished it was the time for casting! so i mixed the silicon with the hardner and started pouring the silicon into the mould then i let it about 2 hours to harden.

After it was hard enough i started pulling it off gently and i was very happy about the final result!.

Download The STL file

Download The DXF file