FabAcademy 2017 Class

Paulo Serio Ayub Filho

About me

Molding and Casting

In this assingment i've made a desing candle with my mom.

With Mothers day in the horizon I thought that will be nice to my mom if she apeared in my Fab Academy somehow and since my mom make candles for a hobby for quite some time now i tought that this will be perfect opportunity.

For this assingment you will need:

Parafin Wax

A Cilindric Object

Heat (for melting the wax)

String

Ornaments

Kitchen oil

Put the Parafin on low heat and let it melt until it become a clear liquid

While the parafin melt, grab the kitchen oil and spred on your recipient as shown

Remove your now melted wax and grab your string, pour it on your recipient and make sure to leave your string center and upright all the time until your wax is cool and hardened

After some time, the wax should be cool to touch and hard, when that happen remove from the recipient and you shoul have something like this

If you wanna take some steps further you coul add some ornaments to it, in my case i've used wine cork cut in half

When you are happy with your ornaments just pour more melted wax to your recipient, make sure to shake every now and then to remove bubbles

After everything cool down its time to remove and reveal its final form!

In order to have a better look to it you can use a Iron to re-melt the edges and corners to remove any inperfections

Make sure to have something under the candle in order to avoid any wax falling to your table or your feet

Add any other ornaments and you have finished your candle

Molding and Casting

This is a more "traditional" approach to the Fab Lab way of making molding and casting.

In this traditional approach I desing the negative, wich was made on the cnc mill, the I poured the silicon to make the actual mold. with that done i prepared the epoxi resing to make my name Inicials

Link to the Epoxi resing website

before start make sure all the materials are close enough to you and at the rigth size/proportion, to right mix rate for the resing/hardener is 2 portions resing to 1 portion hardener, make sure to use safe equipament and don't use a plastic cup as a conteiner for your epoxi resing or this will happen...

After I desing my negative on Fusion360 I generate the gcode for the cnc mill on fabmdules and went straigth to cutting the parafin wax block the we have here on the FabLab. I have mad a mistake and the sidewall that sould contein the silicon was too thin, so in the vary last cutting route the sidewall fell off and i had the idea to "re melted into place" using the soldering station and it worked just fine.

To generate the code to make the first mould, I used the Fab Modules. It is very similar to the Electronics (PCB) production, but instead of select PCB Traces or outline, we use Rough or Finish cut.

- Load the STL file in fabmodules.org

- Select the Roland Mill Machine

- Selet Wax Rough cut

- Make the resolution smaller, it will generate the high map much faster. It came with 1000 dpi resolution, I made it with 100 dpi resolution.

- Check the units/in. I made the fusion file using cm. So in order to have the correct scale, I had to change the units/in to 2.54

- Rotate the model to -90 in X angle.

- click in “calculate high map”

- select Was Rough cut

- choose machine (“MDX 40A) -set the cutting parameters. I used to rough cut a bit of 6mm. Cut depth of 2mm

- click in calculate.

In this assingment I dind't use a "Finish Toolpaht" because my model wasn't that detailed, so it wasnt necessary.

To machine this mold i used the Rolland MDX-40A

Fusion360 File Avaliable Here STL File Avaliable Here

To make sure my silicon mold would have a secure fit I used some C clamps and a flat piece of plexiglass to seal my mold

My final casting is not perfect because of bubbles of air got trapt on the letters, specially the letter F, one way I could got around that was to use a vibrating platform to shake my mold and help the bubbles get out of the resin.