Wildcard
in this week i tried to make a soft gripper , and this will be also bart of my final project which will be soft food gripper
to this soft gripper i will make a mold the I will cast echo flex on it which will produce a soft structure . the mold will be 3D printed so its two step process printing then casting directly
CAD
here i design the chamfers and the outline which will contain the air and make a movement in specific direction
then i extrude the chamfers 5mm which will be the inner height for the chamfers
after that i extrude the outline with 10 mm which will make the shamfers wall thickness about 5mm which is good enough to contain the air
CASTING
i have used ecoflex 30 because it's the most flexible selcon and for this mold I have mixed 50 for each part ( A and ) 1:1 ratio
Ecoflex™ rubbers are platinum-catalyzed silicones that are versatile and easy to use. Ecoflex™ rubbers are mixed 1A:1B by weight or volume and cured at room temperature with negligible shrinkage. Low viscosity ensures easy mixing and de-airing. Cured rubber is very soft, very strong and very “stretchy”, stretching many times its original size without tearing and will rebound to its original form without distortion. Certified Skin Safe - Cured Ecoflex™ 00-30 is skin safe and certified by an independent laboratory. source
this is the final shape after curing, so now we have to cover this body to be able to inflate this gripper
to do so we have to stick another layer with the same material
Hero Shot
let's test the final result
Errors and problems
unfortunately, this process was not started forward there were a lot of problems that make the soft gripper not work. the first problem was that the two-layer wasn't sticking together so the soft gripper was not able to inflate the solution was to make the first layer and wait until this layer curating then cast the sound layer on the first layer and on this way you can guaranty that you can in inflate the gripper without any proplem.
the second problem was the soft gripper was not apple to grip in one direction to solve this problem I have a piece of fabric on the second layer to allow the gripper to stretch just in one direction