Week Twelve

This weeks assignments

    Molding something using a CNC router to make the mold.

  • Design an STL model of a mold of a mold. (First decide what to design, obviously).
  • Make toolpaths for 3D designed mold of a mold.
  • Mold the mold.
  • Mold the designed object.
  • Yeah, it was confusing for me too, initially.

    3D design the mold.

    After pondering for a little while I decited I wanted to do something a bit on the complex side and something practical. I decited to cast a ball valve.

    Since I needed to be able to place the spherical ball within the valve I needed to have my design in two parts so that I could fasten them togeather with the ball inside.

    After playing around with the function "combine" in fusion I figgured a way so that I could make the two piece mold. It was a confusing process, but well worth the headache. I first made the 3d model, then I made the mold and then I made the mold of the mold.

    After combining the mold was finished. Then I needed to export the model as STL. I did that by opening up a new model and importing the finished moldes as a one body.

    fusion 3d files

Make the toolpaths for the CNC

For the toolpaths I used PartWorks 3D. First of we needed to define the working area, the units used etc. Then we moved on to the tools that would be needed for the roughing and then eventually finishing. I designed my model to rough with a 1/8in and then finish with the 1/16in.

Then we could eventually see the preview of the milled part.

Moving on to using the ShopBot to cut the wax model.

Milling.

Milling the model was a task for patience. It took in total about 20 minutes to rough mill and about 6 hours to finish.

When the milling was finally over, the next day I poured the molding solution. Thats as far as I got over the week.

UPDATE

When I got the negative out I needed to cut small holes so I could pour the plastic into the mold. I mixed the plastic into two cups but found out afterwards that I hadn't blended them well enought togeather. I used a syringe to inject the liquid plastic into the mold, but also forgot to lubricate the negative so when everything was dry it was severly stuck togeather and I couldn't do anything to it.

So I had to make a new mold. I wanted to see how it would come out with drystone.