MOLD

This week assignment was to design and fabricate a 3d mold and produce fibre composite part in it. I used CNC milling to prepare my mold .

1. The first step was to design in rhino. I made a doubly curved surface in rhino to form the top of my tile.

Next I used "bounding box" command to get the fitting box. And then I split the box using the surface I had made. This gave me the form that can be used as a mold for my composite.

2. Next step is the prepare the toolpath for CNC.

For roughing toolpath I used "Up-cut Bit - Ball nose 0.25" "

Spindle rate was set to 7000rpm

Feed rate was set to 1.5 inch/sec

Plunge rate was set to 1.5 inch/sec

Pass depth is set to 0.1 inches

Stepover 0.075 inch and 30%

For finishing toolpath I used "Up-cut Bit - Ball nose 0.25" "

Spindle rate was set to 12000rpm

Feed rate was set to 2.0 inch/sec

Plunge rate was set to 2.0 inch/sec

Pass depth is set to 0.1 inches

Stepover 0.0375 inch and 15%

The last step was to save the toolpaths to a single file.

3. After creating the toolpaths, the next step was to CNC the file to get the mold.

I had stuck 4 number of 8in x 8in , 11 mm thick mdf to prepare my mold. Once my cnc mold was ready, I used it for preparing my composite tile.

Final design file can be found here.