Week 8: Molding and Casting

Molding and Casting

Since I am a part of Currier House, the greatest House on campus, I thought for this week I would pay homage to Currier by doing my mold and casting of a tree. First, before I can make my mold I need to make the thing which I want to make a mold of. So I 3D printed a tree and an enclosure to hold the Oomoo.

After the oomoo cured, I filled it with bismuth. In order to use bismuth, I used the pot, and put the bismuth in the microwave oven at the pizza setting. Once the bismuth had melted, I poured it into the mold and let it cool.

While I liked how the tree came out there was some excess material left on the tree from my lack luster pour. Because of this took a soldering iron and I heated up the bismuth in the areas where their was excess and I let it melt and fall back into the bowl.

CNC Milling

Again keeping with the currier theme, the design below was inspired by the Currier mascot Woody. Since woody is a tree, I wanted to etch him into a piece of wood. So I took the design I made in photoshop and then with Kalos's help brought it into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into a dxf.

Click Here to Download my Woody dxf

I then took that dxf into aspire, and specified that it cut everything that was not a black, and then I calibrated the xyz values of the shopbot. For x and y I brought it to the left front corner and zeroed x and y. For z I got a piece of paper and dropped down the drill bit until their was friction between the paper and the drill bit. From there I just let the shopbot cut the piece out for me.