Casting!

10/17/2012

As a fan of chocolate and robots, my goal going into this is to eventually create a mold that I can eventually use to create a little chocolate robot.

Solidworks has a full Molding palette, but I stuck to the basics and used SolidWorks' sketch and extrude features to build the robot and walls around it. I then used the Fab Module to convert from .stl to the Modela module. I had some trouble configuring the 3D settings initially (swapped the intensity setting) and caused the Fab Module to chuck on forever calculating the path. Once I figured out that the "top" intensity refers to the top of the mold, it worked fine.

 

The milling took a really long time (2 to 3 hours) because of the depth I had chosen (0.25mm instead of the 0.75 shown) because I thought that would give me better wax mold. In reality however, my mold didn't take advantage of that Z resolution, so it was not a good use of time. It was nevertheless rewarding to see the robot come to face in the wax. I didn't do a "finishing" run because I liked the ribbed pattern on the surface. The Ooomoo mold also came out great.

 

The Drystone result...(looks a bit like a sour tart candy)...

Hoping to get some food safe silicon to finish up my goal of a making chocolate robots!!