Sooyeon Jeong

Molding and Casting

I used Antimony to design a snowbear figure. The more I try out Antimony, the more I like it because I do not have to use the mouse extensively, which tends to tire out my fingers. I exported the STL file and below is how it looks.

Then, I machined the wax block with the desktop ShopBot. It felt more manageable after using the big ShopBot and the instructions on the Windows machine was very detailed and easy to follow. It took a bit to mill the molds with 1/8" bit. The rough path took 6-8 minutes and the finish path took about 30 min. I was worried that the snowbear's pointy nose would be broken off during the milling process but it actually turned out great.

Next, I worked on Oomoo. It was really fun to mix the two materials with the 1:1 ratio. The blue material felt less sticky than the green material and I made sure the color of the mixed material was turquoise. I made sure not to create bubbles while mixing and tapped the bottom of the mold to remove bubbles from the surface between the wax and the oomoo. I left the mold under the vent, came back 3-4 hours later and peeled off the silicon mold.

The surface looked very smooth and there were no signs of bubbles. I was glad that I tapped the bottom of the wax mold many times. Then, I worked on casting with Drystone. I cut the mold into two pieces and made sure the three edges were lined up well. I put tapes around the molds to make sure they wouldn't move during the casting process.

Then, I made the mixture for casting. I didn't find the scale in the shop so just mixed the water and the Drystone power approximately in 1:5 ratio. The mixture was supposed to be like pancake mix. Then I poured the mix into the hole, tapped the bottom several times to let out the bubbles and waited for many many hours for the cast to cure. After I peeled off the silicon mold, it looked like below. Most of the surfaces look fine except for a small bubble on the pointy nose and on one side of the ears.