12. Molding and casting¶

Group assignment:¶

Review the safety data sheets for each of your molding and casting materials
Make and compare test casts with each of them

To see our group assignment click here

Individual assignment:¶

Design a mold around the stock and tooling that you’ll be using, mill it (rough cut + (at least) three-axis finish cut), and use it to cast parts.

For this week I decided to make a mould to make a little rabbit.

To achieve this, we divided our work into several parts: designing the countermold, cutting the countermold into several parts for 2.5 D machining with the Roland SRM-20, making the molds and finally creating the little rabbit. 🥰️🥰️🥰️🥰️🥰️

COUNTERMOLD DISING ¶

To design my counter-mold, I imported the .STL file of my little rabbit.

Then I made a mesh in order to prepare the piece for the counter-mold.

Our rabbit is now ready we can start with the contours of our counter-mold.

Then we’ll outline our contours

We’ll use the mirror tool to make the opposite side of our mold.

Now that we have all the faces of our mold, we can export it in .STL file.

PREPARING FOR MACHINING ¶

To prepare for machining, we’ll use vcave. To begin with, we’ll import our counter-mould.

Next, we’ll center the part

We opened the stl file of our mold with v-carve and set the import parameters as shown below :

Once the import is finished, we proceeded to the generation of the toolpaths. To do this we used the “3D Roughing Toolpath” option for the roughing and the “3D finishing Toolpath” option for the finishing. To generate the roughing toolpath we proceeded as follows.

We proceeded in the same way as below to generate the finishing toolpaths. Once the toolpaths were generated we proceeded to their registration as indicated below.

ON THE monoFab¶

At y’ello lab, we have 3 different sizes of machinable wax, as you can see below (this image was taken from the website Karam Khrais).

Here’s the tool we’re going to use 1/8.

To find out how it works, see our week04

REALIZATION OF MOLD ¶

For the production of the negative molds we used SORTA-Clear 37 silicone mold rubber.

Caution: chemical products for molding can be dangerous for your health, for this reason there are safety rules that must be respected. we have selected the most relevant ones for us for more details click here