Molding and Casting

Group Assignment

With Anthony we first looked at some examples of different materials, and then we proceeded to go through the steps where we learned about how to use the Mold Star 15 SLOW. We used water to roughly figure out how much of each Mold Star part we would need. The key thing was to pour carefully as a thin bead and Anthony also showed us a method to raise some of the air bubbles, which is tap the mold on the table few times.
The website has the details on the datasheets: https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MAS.863/EECS/Week9.html

Then we went on to learning how to use bees wax to smooth the surface, especially useful for 3d prints. We heated the bees wax with a hot air gun and painting it on the part - and then heated the part while tilted to let the excess bees wax drip away. Then we put it under a warm light to expedite the solidification process.

For my assignment I wanted to cast my family’s symbol which is a circle triangle and square, for me, my mom and my dad respectively - I don’t know how this was originally made. The first thing I did was cad design the part (I did it in TinkerCad because I do enjoy using it for simple designs)- it was pretty straight forward and printed it on the EECS Prusa Core One with the following settings.

Then I was on to bees wax - it was hard to remove all the layer lines but I was able to smoothen it out a bit. On the left is the before right is after, notice that in the center of the shapes the beeswax caught the gap.

The Mold Star was straight forward to use - however I felt that my stirring was not good because I had a decent amount of small bubbles despite using the method of stirring the outside. I kept stirring slowly and tried to spot as many bubbles and pop them by brining them to the surface. Then I put it under the heat lamp, and came back after the weekend.

It looked quite good but you can still see some layer lines on the edge of the shape, I think that is because the beeswax was blown off the edge more than the center. I then used the DryStone mix, by taking a plastic cup of water and adding the powder to it until it felt like a yogurt consistency. I poured it slowly and evenly and didn’t fill it up to the top and kept around a mili meter gap. Then I came back at the end of the work day and picked it up, and it looked great!

File.