Week FOURTEEN

Composites

What is Composites : A Composite material (also called a composition material or shortened to composite, which is the common name) is a material made from two or more constituent materials with significantly different physical or chemical properties that, when combined, produce a material with characteristics different from the individual components (wikipedia)

Assignment :

Design and make a 3D mould, and produce a fiber composite part in it.

What I did :

Design :
I used Tinkercad to design nuts plate by choosing the half sphere from the basic shapes and changed the dimensions and reduced the hight to 15mm since the wood bed is 18 mm thick, then duplicated the shape 8 times and arranged it as shown below then exported the design as .stl file
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How to make 3D toolpath in ArtCAM

I opened the stl file in ArtCAM software and in the Mill Wizard then I browse the 3D design file then i clicked next and you can see the screenshots below of the 3D file, moreover we can see the cut direction where we want to cut, i select top cut direction then I clicked next .

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The upcoming new window we can see the xyz axis and make sure it is correct, I want to print all of them for that I choosed buttom of model the I click next .

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for milling we are using two types of bits 3mm roughing bit and 3mm finishing tool for that i select both of them as shown below .

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I calculate and simulate then I saved the file as .nc file
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Milling :

Using the machine controller I loaded the .nc file and set the 3 axis X,Y & Z and started milling

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Composite :

I coved the wood with plastic transparent tape to avoid sticking then I cut a rice bag and cotton fabrics in squares slightly bigger than the wooden piece after that I mixed the two resin pictured below in a ratio of 2:1 then I used 5 layers in the following order 1)cotton 2)rice bag 3)cotton 4)rice bag 5) cotton, adding them one by one and spreading the mixed resin on each layer evenly.
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After that I wrapped it with plastic and placed it in a vacuum bad sealed it and used the vacuum cleaner to remove the air from the bag but it was leaking so I filled a bag of sand and put it above the vacuum bag and leave it till the next day.
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And here is my nuts plate
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