A infinite loop of Stirring, Waiting, and Sanding | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

It’s now 04.27.2017 1:08 am in the morning, and it’s finally time to sit down in front of my computer, go through all my folders that I created this semester, and reflect upon how I had an amazing a semester with ENGI 210. All those files, all those photos, all those memory with the bean bag in the basement… I’m content to say, this is the most fruitful 4 months I ever had. I guess it is because all the individual projects we’ve done, and all the problem solving experience in those projects. Sitting here typing, I feel glad to say farewell to ENGI 21o with our final project–Chess piece molding.

Initially, I thought this project would be as straight forward and standardized as 3D printing or plasma cutting. Following the procedures in the document, it sounds easy. But Fusion 360 just ruined my life. How do you drag a piece in Fusion 360 or align it to a plane??? Until this every sec, I still don’t know how could that be accomplished. Finding certain icons/tools/settings just killed me. What is a mesh, how do you design an object? And why does the computer have to crush at every sec?!! I learnt smart, I found a fast computer in the computer lab, I got my own Solidwords and Fushion 360 ( interesting things happened), and Nicolas and I decided to work at quiet hours to actually figure out how things work.

We prepared two generations of files. First, we did one together, goofing around with Fushion 360. Then we restarted so that we don’t miss anything. We did one together with Fushion 360 only, with Nicholas operating, and later I prepared another file using Solidworks. In the beginning, we didnot know how does Carvey read the G-code file at all. We wrongly set the piece on the bottom of the block.

It was after 10 min it started when I was confused :” What on earth is it doing, cutting a deeper and deeper hole ?” And I realized we setup our file incorrectly, and this cut is going to take sooooo long. ” When you actually carry out the cut, you will suddenly understand about a lot things.” quoted from Dr Wettergreen.

With our second generation of files, we considered a lot more before we actually carried out the cut ( honestly, we couldn’t cut because everyone was cutting since Monday).

Solidworks (works really well when things started to make sense) It’s really easy to make fillets, but we decided that won’t be essential.Fushion 360 ( So user-unfriendly)

But we decided to use the second file because that we’ve already simulated and made sure it worked. Btw, the weird twin tail design saved us time by not having to make a mirror second file. The pins are symmetrically designed so that the same mold would fit the exact same other half when flipped.

Our first piece failed because we used extrusion instead of extrusion cut. (And I slept on four chairs in front of the Carvey to wait for it to finish…)The Carvey saw every pin as positive and went further down than it should. With this piece, we find that the 0.3 mm in bit and a lot others won’t physically work at certain points where the slope is too deep.

We had a fun time finding out what type of bit are those tiny bits.

We solved all the problems with our second cut.

The smoothing setting gave us a really fine surface. As the fine cut file somehow was off and punched that hole about 1/4 to the left (it should cut the crown), we skipped the fine cut (and spent hours sanding down the connection part in the end as we don’t have perfectly vertical edges–you can never run away from your problem, you have to solve it anyhow)

That night, I slept comfortably in the nice cozy corner

It would be perfect if I can switch off this very light though.

Morning Rice

I sanded the mold with 800 grid sandpaper, we also used the vacuum chamber and that produced really nice silicon molds.

I found a way to do a really interesting color effect. Mix the easy-flow well, pour half into the mold, add a drop of dye to the rest and stir only slightly (don’t completely spread the paint).