The final project of ENGI 210 was frustrating but also rewarding. Throughout the process our team (Paul, GeeTINAjali, and I) had to prototype and troubleshoot continuously until we stumbled upon our final product. We were tasked with creating the Rice Academic Seal using casting and CNC milling processes. We did not initially expect this project to be so hard, but it soon proved otherwise. Despite this, however, we had fun along the way and in the end produced a cast that we believe is better than the official seal in Fondren Library (hehe). Here is an image of our final product all decked out to look like a plaque:

During the beginning stages of this project we spent a lot of time on Illustrator trying to make the strokes of each shape and line thicker so that when we imported it to Easel all of the paths would be recognized. (A quick note: Our team decided to use Easel Inventables for creating the gcode for the CNC because it was the most user friendly and intuitive of the softwares that we tried out). We spent a lot of time importing new versions of the seal to Easel just to realize that the finer details like owls and crisp lines would not show up on the toolpaths. Each time we took this to mean that we had to go back to Illustrator and make the lines thicker. It was not until we got a tip from Ben about the different cut options on Easel that we realized we could do this in a much simpler way. In the end what we did was go on Illustrator just to reflect the seal (to make sure that it would face the correct way when cast), and then import it Easel and do all of our line specifications from there. We initially had the CNC cut everything on path so that it would recognize the small details. We then left the material in the CNC and went back on Easel and changed everything to a fill so that it would cut out the larger areas that the on path setting would not. This worked quite well as we were able to get all of the detail as well as the fills for the larger regions. The following image shows the tollbooths for fills. You can see that this setting was able to fill in the regions for the thicker parts that on path could not.

From this last paragraph one might think that all we did before the final cast was go back and forth from Illustrator to Easel as few times and then execute a perfect cut. This was not the case. Before cutting the whole thing we decided to just cut an owl to see how the process and details would turn out. For the first cut we tried wood. This worked surprisingly well, but when scaled down slightly would not show full detail. Additionally, wood is very difficult tot cast off of so we instead decided to try cutting out of a large piece of PVC. This was a good material choice as it showed all of the fine detail, but it was very painstaking to post process. We (major props to Tina on this one) spent hours scraping the PVC burrs off of the edges of each path. We then also learned that PVC does not standup to acetone when it needs to be cleaned. The following is a photo of GeeTINAjali and I scraping the PVC burrs off our seal:

We prototyped with many different materials. The first material we tried to cast with was 300q. We learned that when using 300q one must have very very equal proportions because if they are not quite right the 300q will not cure correctly and feels sticky. After the 300q we also tried using foam. We did this mainly because there was only enough 300q left to do one more cast, and we wanted that for our final cast. The foam was really just silly and we had a lot of fun with it. That’s all I can say about the foam as we kind of expected it not to work quite right. We had many issues with casting materials sticking to the PVC and lodging in the fine detail cracks of the mold. We had to use a combination of goo gone, picks, acetone and time in order to most of the left over material out each time.

We were worried that the left over material was going to ruin the look of our casted seal so we went ahead and cut another one out of Paul’s leftover acrylic. This seal looked great and required no burr scraping except for one small issue: the two outer circles of the seal were overlapping in a way that they should not have been. We decided to then use clay as a quick mold test of our old PVC one to see if it was still useable and confirm that we did not need to use the acrylic. The clay turned out surprisingly well so we decided to go ahead and try the 300q again. The following is an image of the clay cast:

The cast we did with the 300q was an all or nothing situation as we only had enough left to do one cast. We decided to take a leap and go for it. We were very happy when we pulled the seal off of the PVC to realize that it had worked. Wahoooooo! We then decided to post process it to look like a wall plaque. We spray painted the seal gold and put a shiny coat on top. We then cut out a mounting panel and label for the seal, as seen in the following photo:

The three of us were very proud of our final product. The seal looked great and showed the fine details that were difficult to capture. It taught us the important of starting small in your prototyping before moving up in scale, and it challenged us to do something creative with the boring old Fondy Rice Seal. Beyond this, I think the three of us have had a fantastic time working together and getting to know each other over the semester. I am glad I worked with these two and I think they would say the same. What a great class this was!!