10. Molding and casting

This week I worked on designing a mold using SolidWorks, that will be used to contain a flexible mold (for edible material), which will be used to prepare chocolate Happy Faces!

Code Example

NO CODE THIS WEEK....

This is the Wax block that we will use to mold…

And this is the initial design that we used to prepare the mold…

In this video we are able to watch the mold designed with SolidWorks, as well as its STL file…

This is the Roland Modela Mill that we will use to mill the wax block to get the first mold, we were not able to use the ShopBot as the bits were all damaged…

Here we can access the Solidworks CAD file Smiley Face Mold Complete.SLDPRT

And here the STL of the above design: Smiley Face Mold Complete.STL

In these video, we see the Roland Modela starting to mill the Wax Block:

After one hour milling, we have not advanced as we wish…

As the software estimates that it is going to take about 7 hours to “draft” mill the mold, and we do not yet know how much more it will take to “finish” it, we decided to stop the milling process and start again next Thursday to be able to complete it, as it is not recommended to leave the machine running without supervision …

This Fiday Morning, we started again, no luck…

This Monday morning, we started again, and here we are just now…

But, look at what we got…

Finally, just today Friday April 4th 2019, I was able to finish my mold, now I am going to use it and pour the casting material…

We used SORTA-Clear™ 37, Water Translucent Silicone Rubber, which is a silicone suitable for making molds for baking, casting ice, butter or chocolate and other applications used to produce food.

Today Friday April 4th 2019 @ 9pm, I separate the flexible silicone mold from the wax one and we are ready to make chocolate Happy Faces…