Molding and Casting

Assignments:

Group assignment:

⚡ Review the safety data sheets for each of your molding and casting materials, then make and compare test casts with each of them.
Extra credit:try other molding and casting processes.

Individual assignment:

⚡ Design a mold around the stock and tooling that you'll be using, mill it (rough cut + three-axis finish cut) and use it to cast parts.
Extra credit: use more then two mold parts.

During week #12 we been doing funny things with molds and other stuff related to that.

At the beginning I have no idea of what I could do with this technique (I've had never tried exploring this "mold world"), so I thought in my Final Project, and I could make the device button by a molding and casting process.

Group Assigments

The materials

1-Liquid Silicone

2- A container

3- Lubricant Silicone

4- Paraffin

Percentage of components used

Component A - 40%
Component B - 40%

Individual Assigment

What should I do?

For this assigment I choose the button path of the device and to start the Molding and Casting process I designed the 3D Model. I model the piece in Rhinoceros (to make it faster)

SRP Player Software

SRP Player is software is a cam software, used for Roland's MDX series Mills, is used as a basic layout program and tool path or strategy.

Press the letter K to access the knife tool

Cutting it

Once I configure the path and those things, I changed the milling bit and I started to use the Roland machine ubicated in the lab. Ive use a 1/4" bit to do the first process of polish

Ubicate the piece in the middle of the plate
Mark the middle of the paraffin piece and draw inside a square, to calculate where is going to work.
Use tape to fix the part.

Filling it

Using the same materials as before (the silicone and the others) I put it into the mold. First, I sprayed the lubricant to the mold and then I poured the silicone into the mold

Problems / Situations: The whole process of mixing things was interesting, but I didn't have enough precautions mixing the components of the resin (A - B) when the result did not dry faster, it has taken 5 days to be dried. Also we had to measure the "Z origin" 2 times, one time taking the origin taking into account the piece that we want to process and the other taking in count the machine bed.

Solutions: Of course, before you start mixing the components...READ THE FABRICANT SHEET, in there you have to find the exact amount of material to mix and for the other situation, is important to be looking at the piece while the machine is working, just doing that you can see what it' s processing and how it's doing it..