Molding & Casting

Assignment
design a 3D mold, machine it, and cast parts from it academy.cba.mit.edu

For this assignment I used the 3D scanned robot (scanned for the 3d scanning assignment) to be able to create a mold to make robot chocolates! The original robot scans can be downloaded here. Imported the .stl file into Rhino & realized the 3D scan had an open area that needed to be fixed.

robot-stl-rhino robot-scan



To fix the broken mesh I used Autodesk MeshMixer which can be downloaded here.

open-mesh repair-mesh



Added a box around the model to create the mold and send it to the modela milling machine. Download the robot files here.

wax box wax box



From Rhino I saved the model into an stl binary file to be able to send it to the modela machine and mill the mold.

wax-first-layer wax-surfacing



Milling the mold by stages: Surfacing, Roughing, Finishing & Drilling.

wax-origin settings waxing wax-drill roughing detailed



From the milled wax mold we will create the food safe silicon mold.

choco choco choco choco choco choco choco choco choco choco choco choco



From the food safe silicon mold we will create the robot from melted chocolate!

choco choco choco choco choco