07

MOLDING AND CASTING

This week we worked on molding and casting.

Tools: Fusion 360, Roland Mill, Oomoo, Hydro-stone
Files: Top - Fusion 360 Project
Date: 10.31.2018

Ideas

Originally I wanted to make a piece of jewerly for my girlfriend, but had some trouble designing it in Fusion so I opted for a bit of a simpler design. I choose to make a top that resembles the one in the movie Inception.

The Design

As usual now, I designed my idea in Fusion 360. I feel like I'm really starting to get a hold of the program now and the design process is moves really quickly.

One tricky aspect of this design was that I had to model the wax block and then seperate my model into two halves. There's got to be a better way to do this than how I did it, but I ended up just modeling the block and then cloning my model and putting them onto the two sides of the block--being sure to check that they're aligned. I forgot to add a way to pour in the substance. Make sure that you remember to add this! Otherwise you'll have to cut a hole manuall with an exacto blade like I had to do.

Making the mold

Now that I had the design, I exported it as an stl file and brought it into fab modules. From there everything was pretty straightforward and I set everything up to be ready to cut in the Roland mill. Here is and image of the tool path from fab modules and how it turned out after.

With the mold made, I then starting casting the Oomoo using the correct ratios as indicated on the bottle. Be sure to measure the ratios by weight and not volume.

Casting the Hydro-stone was very similar to casting the Oomoo. I mixed the correct ratios (by weight) and then let it dry overnight. Here's how it looked right out of the Oomoo.

Finally, I sanded down the edges to make them (kind of) smooth. I did leave the orignal roughness that were there due to a lack of a refinement pass of the mill because I actually liked how they looked.

Now for testing! I recreated the last shot from Inception. Play with sound and full screen so you can see the black bars and it looks more CINEMATIC.