Molding and Casting

This Weeks Assignment is To machine a Mold then Mold a part inside of it, To be honest I can’t think of something that would require a small batch of parts so i think i will do something towards my hobby of ironman cosplay and after a bit of thinking I want to do an ironman helmet ear piece and thus not a very useful project but I can already think how I would like to do it

Project: Ironman Helmet Earpiece

Goal: Machine a Positive Mold (HARD) , cast a negative Mold (SOFT) and finally cast a part out of it (HARD)

Files Used In this Project can be Downloaded here

P.S.: I had some problems with my camera memory and I don’t have all the pics of the actual process

Let the Dance Begin !!!

Now to Start of i need some reference materials On to google images

I think This is goig to be enogh material For me to start

No Going to Inventor 2014 My Comfort zone

Starting Out With a Cylinder

Then adding a Chamfer to it

and After that the Pokcet

and We are Done

Now We Export the STL File from Inventor to Go through Fab Modules

and Now Fixturing the material to the bed using Double sided tape simple huh

And After zeroing the Bit in all 3 Axis we Are ready to roll

Starting with the roughing pass

and after almost 3+H we have the Rough piece (Unfortunately I don’t have a pic of it in it rough state)

and after a the finishing pass we end up with this

A pile Of Wax Shavings but underneth it we find the treasure

Great Now after that we need to coat it with mold release and start the casting process

I will be casting Smooth on liquid rubber material

and in that i will cast Smooth-On Liquid plastic

but because of the memory problem all i have is what was done nothing on the process itself

Positive Mold (Hard):

Casting the Rubber Mold (Transaction Phase)

P.S : the last image was taken after a while to be honest i dont know what was done for the mold to get to this state

Negative Rubber Mold (Soft)

and Now casting The Final (Hard) Finished Part

and that was the Final Product as you can see there are a lot of problems with this part but almost all of them can be attributed to Air bubbles etc.

now that i have done it can see the possibilities of milling 3d ejects and doing small runs of parts next to 3d printing them while the process is a bit daunting and vary variable to the un-familiar (ME) it can yield huge gains over time with a bit of overhead in the beginning

Next Step Build the rest of the Armor

Awesome see you next week