Design and make a 3D mold and produce a fiber composite part in it
This week was a bit of a question mark for me
I wasn´t quite sure what kind of an item i wanted to design and whether i could implement it to my final project or not
But in the end i decided to make a bigger version of a bottle i designed for the Molding and casting week
I created an inverted model in tinkercad for the shopbot to cut out
Now my next step was to open my finished 3d file in Vcarve Pro
I was going to cut my part in white foam. It´s easy to cut out foam and the end mills for the shopbot should not have problems with it
I measured the foam piece and determined the sizes in Vcarve Pro
The size of the foam was 600x500x70mm
The program gives you a good idea on how the cut will look like, if it will succeed
My next step was to create the roughing and finishing toolpath
I used a 0.25 inch ball nose for both the roughing and the finishing toolpaths
These are the settings for the roughing part
And these are the settings for the finishing part
I saved the toolpaths and started the cut
Instructions on how to use the shopbot can be found in previous week projects
This was the outcome
The material i decided to use for the composite was glass fibre
Me and the other interns visited a glass fibre factory on our island that specializes in fixing boats, using glass fibre
The owner there taught us a few things about resin mixing and methods for layering the glass fibre
We bought glass fibre from there and also 2 liters of resin
We used a half portion of the resin for our composites
The mixing went pretty well
Now it was time to layer 3 rounds of glass fibre on my mold
I let the model stand overnight and checked the results the morning after
I was not optimistic for the model to be perfect so i was not quite shocked when i saw the results
The biggest mistake i made was to not put a plastic film on the bottom of the model before i put the layers on top
That led to the model being a little rough and the foam got stuck to it