Composites

This week's assignment is to design a 3D mold and produce a fibre composite in it.

I want to design a lamp shade for the fluorescent light in my office.

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My first step was sculpting the surface in Blender.

Then the exported .stl file from Blender was imported into PartWorks 3D.

The original dimension of the lamp shade is 3.95' X 1.95'. Since the estimate time just for the rought cut would be more than 2 hours and the ShopBot was quite busy during that day. I decided to make a mini version first.

Milling

I then cut out the piece from the board and used a heat gun to seal the pores on the surface.

The foam piece was first wrapped by plastic film, and then 2 layers of burlap, 1 layer of perforated pink film, and 2 layers of Bleeder. They were then put into a vacuum bag.

Final Composite. Overall it looks OK, but there are "Wrinkles" on one surface produced by the vacuum bag. It would probably be better to use a 2-Part Mold for such surface.

One day after I made another one with the original size (3.95' X 1.95').

And then install that in my office!

The result is not very bad. Next time I will design better shape and also get rid of the dark area in the middle caused by the overlapping of the burlap.