Composites

Assignments

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

Vcarve Pro and the Shopbot

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

Making the composite

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

Files from week 14

3D model of the bottle

The vectric file