This week, I decided to create a mold for a stamp of the last character of my Chinese name, “鸣” （Ming), which means the chirp of a bird. To add a bit of personality, I decided to change the “口” to a heart. After attempting some calligraphy on Procreate, I ended with this.

Then, I exported the image and used Adobe illustrator to convert raster to vector. Finally, I exported the SVG file to Fusion.

To create the mold, I needed to first figure out the orientation for the mold of the mold so that the casted stamp correctly orients the character. The mold of the mold needs to be the mirror image of the character, which makes the mold the correct orientation, which makes the stamp the mirror image, which makes the stamped character the correct orientation. :)

After extruding the character and creating the CAD for the mold of the mold. Anthony (echo: the best TA!) helped me CAM the files and made sure the tooling bit is small enough to get all the details of the character. Here is the CNC machine in action!

Here is the finished mold of the mold!

Next up was using OOMOO to create the mold. I first filled the mold of the mold with water to approximate the volume. Then, I measured equal parts of OOMOO A and OOMOO B by volume to sum up to the volume approximated before. After giving it a nice stir, I poured it into the mold of the mold in a slow continuous long stream and banged out any air bubbles.

Here is the finished OOMOO mold! Though there is a little bit of air bubbles, I could simply get rid of these extra parts after casting.

I used the dry stone powder and did the 100:32 weight ratio of powder to water to create the mixture which I poured into the OOMOO mold.

Here is the final casted stamp! Albeit a little bit in size, I will likely use it to stamp on cards I write to friends :). I am also hoping to do metal casting