10. Molding and casting

For molding and casting, I decided to make a two part mold. The first part of my mold is the first picture, aka the part I’ll actually pour my material into.

This is the plug that I will put into the design and held mold the final product.

This is the final product.

When I was making the different molds and the final product, I ended up using the loft tool. I had a lot of trouble using the loft tool at first, so I’ll help explain how to use it. First, you’ll want to offset your plane by moving it to where you want the lift/curve to be. Then, you’ll want to place a point on the center of the plane. Once that is down, click on loft and click on both the plane and the point. You should get a sort of bump on the surface.

  • first I had to redo design with more negative positive stuff, put an outline around it, round edges, the likes
  • made my own moat in Fusion since it’s too diffucult in VCarve
  • made a rough pass, then a finishing pass (1/4 up cut flat, 1/8 up cut ball nose)
  • had to hook up the vaccuum, set axies, put the tool in, set my feed rate
  • change the tool path every run
  • took the thing out and vaccuumed it off

Roughing File Smoothing File