08: CNC Milling

For this lab class, our job was to make a mold using a CNC mill like we had seen Rob do on Tuesday. We had been asked to divide ourselves in pairs and I was with Emi.

Constructing the Mold

The mold was designed on Fusion 360 as a .stl file and was a car. Emi did this by making faces and then extruding them via the loft tool.

We then uploaded this file onto the CNC mill through a USB and began to set the machine up. We used a piece of styrofoam that was apporimately 200x200 milimetres and our model was specifically designed to fit that size. The mill uses multiple tool paths to cut the piece of styrofoam. For ours, it used 2 (one was a rough cut and the other was the finishing cut). I made a timelapse of both of the cutting procedure which can be seen below.

In the next picture, the finished mold can be seen.

Layering

Now it was time for us to start layering our mold. The first step in this process was to coat the mold in a layer of saran wrap. After this we spread a solution (two part Epoxy and one part ONS Hardener) on pieces of canvas that we had cut to cover our design completely. We placed 3 layers of canvas all on top of each other and then covered it all with another layer of saran wrap that was perforated using a spiked roller. A layer of cotton was also put over this after which we used the food preserver to place this all in a bag and vaccum seal it.