For the chess pieces, we first created two positives of the chess piece. The original plan was for the one of the positives to be 3D printed, and the other one to be CNC routed out of a block of wood. This ended up not happening, as there was an issue with the CNC machine and it executing our file.
The first step was to find a file from Thiniverse and 3D print it to get a visual representation of it.
Here is our 3D printed piece.
After printing it out and looking at the size, we decided to make it .5 inches taller, with it ending up being 2.5 inches in height. We 3D printed a positive of the front of the Among Us character. We casted a mold of it as seen below.
For the other end of the Among Us character, we originally planned to CNC it, but we we faced an issue with the machine. Here is our file photos and a video to the machine. We asked multiple people, and weren’t able to figure out why it was doing this. So instead, we 3D printed the other end.
We did the end of the mold the same way we did the front of the mold. With both sides of the mold created, we rubber banded them together to keep them in place. We then poured castable resin part A and B in separate cups to a 1:1 ratio. We added food coloring to Part A, and mixed it. Once it was throughly mixed, we quickly mixed in Part B before the mixture could harden. We then poured it slowly into the mold, making sure to rotate the mold around to properly coat the inside of the mold and to prevent ai bubbles. The pieces cured and hardened pretty quickly, within 6-7 minutes. Once they were hardened, we removed the rubber bands and removed the hardened piece from the mold. We had difficulty with the backpack area of the mold, due to how it was cut, but some of them turned out well!
We created a total of 10 pieces, but only kept 8. We post-processed them by cutting and smoothing out the edges with a xacto-blade and sandpaper. Here are the final results!
Clean work space:
Cost Analysis:
For the silicone and polyurethane mixture, we didn’t use a lot of either materials so I would say maybe a total of $20. For the PLA filament, I would say we used about $10 worth, as we had to 3D print both sides of our mold. For Sandpaper, maybe .50 for the use we got out of it, as well as an xacto-blade for $3. We used the printer for about 2 hours which would be $9, and about 12 hours of labor, with a little bit over minimum wage pay of $8 would be $96. This would total to $138.5
