HTMAAA Week 7 / Molding and Casting

We got trained on the CNC and it was really a combination of several different things. Collets and all.

Some memos from Anthony’s recitation

Finishing PASS parallels
- 1200 rpm, 150 in/min for 1/4", 80 in/min for 1/8" ball endmill
- plunge 50 in/min
- min retraction policy (linking)
- set helix default
- max roughing (0.1-0.15)


- same rpm, cutting feed (inversely proportional to tool diameter) use 80 instead of 150 in/min
- rest machining (toggle on, save time, machine won’t remachine empty spaces)
- biggest feature it should ignore
- add perpendicular passes toggle on
- stepover 10 thou
- minimum retraction in linking

Here Alfonso was showing one of his favorite UIs.

Alfonso headed up with teaching how to use the Genimitsu, a really cheap CNC for what it does, and we were able to create some sweet GCODE tool paths for it.

I ended up trying to make some kind of origami tesselation using the origami simulation software that was showed before https://origamisimulator.org/.

It really was great at creating the SVG layer, but much of the lines were really really short, and I was expecting some kind of one long curvature that wasnt happening.

The OBJ on the otherhand was quite decent, so I used that and plugged it into Rhino, where I would be able explode it and break it apart. Luckily Alfonso helped out here so I could make 1 sole piece out of the process.

It was a really fun project, and I learned a lot about how to use the Genmitsu.

This was the simulation of my adaptive pass

and of my parallel pass.

A close up of the parallel, and you can see there are some graphical glitches that occur, interesting..

I then used the Genmitsu to carve out the design from the wax, to make a mold from a mold

The casting week was then taught by CBA TA Marcello, telling us how to use the liquid plastic as well as the OMOO mixture, which seemed to be a really easy combination of 1:1.

I then casted it using OMOO for creating the case.

• The vibration machine worked great for taking out any of the bubbles from the cast
• We can use the vacuum to remove bubbles in your plastic mold
• And we can use fire to burn off the bubbles in your parts

Then I poured in Liquid Plastic, which required equal parts of both A and B. The mixture was really easy to make

Some tips were -use the vibration plate to remove bubbles from your

I made alot to make a tesselation of all the casts that I didn

For the molds and the models, the files can be found here here

We could not do metal casting this week, but if we were able to I would have liked to be able to create some rings.

Because of my knowledge on casting, it seemed that I made something that was impossible to mold, because of the overhangs that would be created. Johnny told me that this would be possible through lost wax casting, though we didn’t necessarily have the tools to do so. but nevertheless I made a houdini sim to create the ring.

For the houdini, the file can be found here

For the fusion, the file can be found here