The task this week is the manufacture a product using compounds.
For this task I used resin and glass fiber, in this regard I have a observation on the first resin used.
Polyester Resin:
This resin forge faster than the epoxy resin, but unfortunately the required concentrations wasn't knew, the result was a very bad product. Generates an exothermic reaction that one has to be careful.
In that sence, the product that I wanted to develop for this task was a minimalist control or controller. This because I was inspired by the MIDI controllers that use the DJ's, but as I just want to test, I will use two buttons.
Design and manufacture:
The design was done entirely in Solidworks and for its manufactur I made the mold in MDF using Partworks 3D for the Shopbot with a strawberry of a 6.5 mm for the roughing and for the finishing a strawberry of 3 mm.
Once you have the mold, it must be grease it with mold release grease, at least 3 layers to avoid that the material that we use to make the negative mold sticking to the mold of MDF.
To make the negative mold, I used silicone along with its catalyst. The required amount is 2% of reactive and 98% of silicone according to volume. Both are mixed with a palette and poured the contents in a box with the mold, before this I made a box in acrylic with the laser machine for the mold in wood.
It took approximately 8 hours to harden the silicone used to make the negative mold.
Grease the negative mold with Mold release agent, trying to reach out to all parties.
Once we have the negative mold, continue to manufacture the end product using epoxy resin and glass fiber.
To use the epoxy resin, it is necessary to mix two components that we'll call A and B. The composition is 50% of each one in mass. Mix both components with carefully avoiding to make circles with the palette, in reality it has to be done from side to side.
We prepare snippets of glass fiber with the form of our product and we will be adding layer by layer the fiber together with the resin resulting from a mixture of components A and B.
The right thing is to start with the walls little by little to completely fill the negative mold.
It took approximately 24 hours in harden the resin, but some areas were still fresh.
Remark:
It is important to take safety measures, such as the use of gloves and mask to work with resin.
To finish, about the draft of the control or controller, perform the following tasks:
- Manufacture of Arduino to go to the inside of the controller.
- Manufacture of the control buttons on silicone.
- Manufacture circuit using RGB LED and outputs PWM
