Andre!
Roy!
Team Rocket blast off at the speed of light!
Surrender now or prepare to fight!
Andre and I team up for the final project! We originally wanted to make something like a lance, staff or hammer (weapons are cool) but ultimately decided against it for design reasons. We settled on something fun but simple, the rocket.
We set off to design a fairly simple model using our weapon of choice, me using SolidWorks and Andre using AutoCAD. We ended up using Andre’s draft as we found it easier to make the positive mold in AutoCAD.
Our initial impressions of Fusion 360 was not a favorable one. I particularly found the interface to be counterintuitive and struggled a lot with basic tasks like rotating the model or editing simple features. Eventually we were directed to a very helpful tutorial on Other Machine which allowed us to successfully create our first G-Code!
Everything went pretty smoothly. Or so we thought until we brought it over to the CNC Machine and error messages started popping out like crazy. Turns out that everyone else had more or less the same trouble with their G-Code. We called it quits for the day after hours of trying to figure it out.
The next day we were informed that Lucas and Brian had gotten theirs to work, and with some helpful advice from them we tried to fix our G-Code by simply deleting the lines where the error occurred. And it worked! I think it had something to do with Fusion 360’s G-Code containing settings for things that our CNC machine didn’t have, like cooling.
Looking back on it, there were probably more elegant methods of creating the G-Code than simply going through and deleting the lines that didn’t work. I remember one group said something about how they used Easel after Fusion 360 to create the code, but at that point Andre and I were both pretty fed up with Fusion 360 and wanted to move on.
We cut the two pieces of 4 x 3 x 2 inch wax using the bandsaw and set it in to cut in the CNC machine.
On a side note, apparently the estimated cut time in Fusion 360 is not right. We were originally afraid of the wax taking a long time to be cut, so we set the feed rate to be like 5000 in/min or something We had an estimated cutting time of 10 minutes on Fusion 360 while the actual cut on the CNC machine took over four hours… #OEDKLateNights
I think our problem was that the depth per cut was too low. We don’t remember seeing it during our G-Code configuration, but it might have been hidden off in a corner somewhere. If we had to do this again, the first thing I would do is find and increase. the depth per cut setting.
After the wax was finally finished, we used the mold to then create the oomoo negative and let it sit over night to cure.
We came back next morning and took out the supports. We were a bit concerned because some bubbles formed when we poured the oomoo in a bit too fast, but thankfully no deformations occurred. Then we mixed some of the liquid plastic in and out came our first batch of rockets!
Next is adding some color to it.
At this point we were planning to simply glue the two halves together. However, credits to Lucas and Brian for “The Brazilian Method”. Simply put, finish one half of the plastic rocket first. Then pour the other half of the liquid into the mold and before the liquid hardens, slap the already finished half onto the liquid. While the liquid half hardens, it will naturally stick itself to the finished half, no gluing needed!
While the plastic was hardening I had some extra time on my hands, so I played got smashed by Mikaela at Pokemon Showdown.
Team Rocket blasting off again…
We ended up making two more rockets using the other liquid plastic and different colors.
Final group photo of everything!
This final project definitely took a lot longer than we had initially expected, but we came out of it having learned a lot. Our first major obstacle was learning how to create G-Code in Fusion 360 – a program neither of us have any experience in.
We were able to get through it using a very helpful tutorial, but ran into our next problem of configuring it to work on our CNC machine. After some help from our classmates, we figured it out and successfully created our own wax mold. The oomoo and plastic part were fairly straightforward and much more fun compared to creating mold albeit very messy.
Creating the plastic figures took quite a lot of work from start to finish, but looking at the finished products, we are really proud of what we made!
