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CNC WITH X CARVE - MOLD MAKING

3D MODELLING

I wanted to model some type of creature for this assignment, and considering I had thought about doing a Pokemon for one of this class's previous assignments, I figured I could put that idea to use this week. I settled with doing dratini because of how easy I expected it to be due to its simple design.

For my model, I heavily referenced one I found on Thingiverse, and used a screenshot as a reference to model the body. It was overall pretty easy to model with a pipe form and a quadball for the head, especially since it was symmetrical.

CAM AND CNC

Figuring out how to do the CAM for this assignment was a big hurdle. I first tried doing it through Fusion because it was fresh in my mind from last week. I was left very confused on how to make it only carve around the model and not try to cut the entire block of wax down or cut the shape out, which would inevitably break the bit. I switched to using the Inventables Easel software and it generated both a roughing nad a finishing pass. Before coming into the lab on Friday I read the X Carve guide and watched the start up tutorial video, both linked on the IRL website. I still needed some guidance on setting up the machine just to ensure I didn't catastrophically mess something up. On this cut attempt however, I had to stop it half way through because it was attempting to cut all the way through the block. After consulting Jonathan about how to select only certain lines as parameters for Fusion to generate passes within, I switched back to using that instead and began my second cut attempt.

Once my carve finally finished it was apparent that it didn't do a very clean job. Likely because my stepover on my finishing pass was 0.2 instead of 0.1. I chose to do this because I didn't have time for my cut to take the extra hour to do that as it was getting late and I expected to need to stay for another two hours to wait for my cast to cure. I had to clean it up a bit with an x-acto knife because some of the wax also melted into globs during the cut.

CASTING

Once I reached this stage my morale was already pretty low and I was shocked to find out that seemingly every container of Oomoo 25, both previously opened and unopened, were unsuable as the part A had become a solidified mass. I tried pouring it but it wouldn't even move out of the container even when I tried to push it out with a popsicle stick. It just stuck to it like a slime and tore off when I tried to stir it. I also checked a container of the Semi-Clear and it had the same unuseable consistency. At this point it was getting late and it seemed like there was nothing that I could do so I had to admit defeat and leave.