Week 10

Goal

For this week, I wanted to mold and cast a boot. My final project will walk around on many feet, which all need to have traction. Molding and casting is a great way to use materials with high traction and it is a great way to make 100 of something. So, this week was a good opportunity to prototype for my final project.

Design

I decided to use Blender to design my boot, because I have never used Blender. The boot I designed is below:

I figured out how to sculpt, but in the interest of time, I ended up keeping the two starting shapes for the design.

I exported the STL file and imported it into Fusion, where I designed a two-part mold. (It quickly became apparent that I had not exported with enough shapes for the cylinder, which I should have addressed earlier.)

Making the Molds

I made two molds: one out of wax on the Genmitsu, and one out of resin on the FormLabs SLA printer.

The wax mold presented significantly more challenges, and I made a few mistakes Most critically, I was not able to drill the sides of the larger second mold, which are high-aspect-ratio cuts in the first mold, because the collar ran into the sides of the mold.

The SLA printing was painless and high-quality (despite using the Fast material). The mistake I made there was printing the entire design, which was made to include the wax stock.

Molding the second Mold

For each of the two molds, I used two types of soft material: Oomoo and the food safe Silicone. Out of the four, three worked well (or, as well as the original mold allowed). The food safe silicone did not cure properly in the Fast SLA.

Molding the Boots

I tried each material in each mold, and none worked. I then tried like-in-like with wax as mold release, and I that worked better.