Oh boy, was this the most satisfying assignment I’ve ever had to do! I mean this in the most sarcastic, yet at the same time, sincere way as possible. Like other assignments in ENGI 210, this project brought a few moments of frustration and many hours of patience and waiting, but the feeling that I got when I pulled out the positive molds from the Carvey, the negative molds from the positive molds, and the final casts from the negative molds is inexplicable! While this assignment included many failures and retries, Noah and I were able to create what we believe are beautifully constructed molds and casts of the knight chess piece. You might have noticed the little pun that I included in the title. Although we may have started casting our pieces a little bit after everyone else, I personally believe that the grand number of hours that we spent modeling on Fusion 360 and watching our positive molds cut in the Carvey (we watched both halves of our final positive molds take 6 hours each) made for an easier casting process and, as a result, allowed us to make excellent chess pieces.
Materials used to create the negative mold: Oomoo 25 parts A and B and Ease Release 200
First attempt at milling our positive mold
Our first parallel fine cut
Fusion 360 file
Starting our first wax brick positive mold
When the first wax cut has finished — the moment of truth
Successful rough cut of our positive knight mold
Carvey beginning to mess up due to milling too much material too quickly
Our beautiful negative knight mold
Successful milling of our mold after vertical and horizontal parallel cuts
Carvey messing up again due to trying to mill too much material too quickly
Successful wax brick cut after vertical and horizontal parallel cuts
The degree of detail on our negative mold turned out to be amazing
Close up: if you look closely enough you can see how fine the horizontal and vertical cuts left the positive mold
