This week was quite entertaining, we had the task of designing a 3D model and then reproduce it through molding and casting techniques.

- Designing the 3D model.

I use Rhinoceros, to design a piece for joining shaped tubes "T".

In the same software, I designed the mold which later became the machining wax to produce the negative mold.

The negative mold've designed taking into account the place where the material would be emptied. It is also important to consider some holes to allow air to leave the interior of the mold at the time of casting.

I'll talk about this below.

- Milling the mold with the ShopBot .

I exported the 3D model of my mold at STL to pass the PartWorks3D, with the help of this software could program the machining of the mold.

For Roughing machining, I used a 1/8 en mill tool to empty all unnecessary material for my mold. For the Finishing machining, I used a 1/8 ball nose with four flutes.

I used a piece of paper to separate the molds, I have not included the separation in the machinable wax because if it was decreasing the size of my 3D model, would lose some details from it due to the minimum diameter of the milling tool was 1/8 .

- Molding.

For molds I mixing the rubber kit available in the Fab Lab TECSUP is necessary to mix evenly and then casting in the mold of machinable wax

To extract I needed to have careful and take the mold slowly to avoid mistakes or break it.

- Casting.

During the casting I basically experienced with 3 materials:

- RESIN:

To the mixture of the resin is important to consider the proportions of the resin and the catalyst for mixing, there are times when the resin solidifies too fast or never does.

- PLASTER:

- HYDRO STONE.

With Hydrostone plaster and there are no major problems, it is only a matter of adding water to the powder mixing and go until you reach the right consistency for casting in the mold.

- Extracting the final piece of the mold.

Finally, once the casting material has cured proceeded to remove the mold slowly and surely not to damage the piece.

Rhinoceros file: SoporteAlesisdm10cera2.3dm

You can download the heavy files (more than 1MB) here from DROPBOX.