Week 13
Assignment - Moulding and Casting
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Group assignment:
- Review the safety data sheets for each of your molding and casting materials
- Make and compare test casts with each of them
- Compare printing vs milling molds
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Individual assignment:
- Design a mold around the process you’ll be using, produce it with a smooth surface finish that does not show the production process toolpath, and use it to cast parts.
Group Documentation
Safety Data Sheets
- Jesmonite
- Hot Glue
- Plaster
- XTC 3D print Smoother
- SortaClear40, Foodsafe Silicone
- PLA
Test Casts
- Jesmonite
XXX
- Hot Glue Injection
XXX
Individual Assignment
Designed an FDM printed mold.
Tried some models from Printables.com
They were too intricate. So, I used ShrinkWrap in Rhino to reduce the mesh.
I measured a hot glue gun, and made a grasshopper script around automatically subtracting the mould adding sprues and splitting into two parts.
And I measured the material, a small gluestick refill, which was 7mm diameter and 98mm long.
Idea, instead of cutting in Grasshopper:
I used Prusa’s Connector Features to add alignment divets (this is part of the Cut tool). This actually gives you a neat way to add and position them when setting up the job and to test different tolerances.
…Which gives:
And the intention is to make a more complicated pipeline that can take a variety of meshes.
But unfortunately at the moment, looks like this, because of mesh problems.
I found that if you made the mesh of two adjacent boxes in Rhino/Grasshopper, the mesh triangles already aligned with the cut tool and didn’t create any naked edges, so I added that to my script.