Week 14: Molding and Casting

Tree of Life Pendent

Metal casting a pendent top

Made a cast from machinable wax, and then silicone, and finally poured some bismuth alloy into the mold and obtained this pendent top.

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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
• compare mold making processes

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
• extra credit: use more then two mold parts
• extra credit: make your own materials

Group Assignment

kannai Site

Individual Assignment

1. Design with Fusion

2. Milling Machinable Wax

3. Silicone molding

The first one was not good. Some bubbles were in there.

I redo the silicone molding and obtained the version without bubble. The trick is that you use a brush to apply the silicone first.

4. Metal casting

This is my first experiment to cast metal.

First I heated the bismuth alloy in a small Ladle.

The metal was too cold at the first trial.

For the second trial, I tried to fill the cast with spatula, but the metal get cold soon, and the result was not smooth.

So that I heated the metal a lot. Then the metal was too liquid and sliped away from the cast. Scary…

Finaly, with somewhat not too liquid metal, I fill the cast with spatula, and then heated with heatgun, so that the surface goes smooth.

I removed some unnnecessary parts, and here it is my pendent head!