Tiffany Vuong & Mary Brady

We both were pretty confident going into this project, since we had worked together already and felt comfortable with the tools necessary to complete this project. We had a good time working on it and are proud of our final result.

Steps

1. Choose Our Chess Piece

We originally wanted to do a Kermit the Frog chess piece, but after consulting with the 210 Teaching team, they advised us that the specific piece we picked probably wouldn’t work due to the neck flaps that surrounded the piece. We then decided to go with another Muppets character, Fozzie Bear, which ended up being cleared by the teaching team. 

Original Choice

Final Choice 

 

 

2. File Preparation

Once we had the correct file for our chess piece, we started prepping on CAD softwares to create the negatives for the molds that we would ultimately cast our chess piece in. We started in Meshmixer to ensure a workable-sized part and to split our piece into two parts vertically, but not in half — to ensure the best possible outcome for our mold, we split Fozzie about ⅔ back from the front of the piece, just behind his ears. We then worked in SolidWorks to create actual parts for the negatives: we made a box frame around the chess piece flush with the cut side and created keyholes for our mold halves to fit together. 

 

While we didn’t end up creating a CNC part for this project, our final processes in CAD softwares were in Fusion360 to adjust and prep our .stl files from SolidWorks to be sent to the CNC machine ready to cut. 

 

3. 3D Print Both Sides of Chess Piece

Once we had the files we needed, we had to 3D print both sides of the chess piece. This step was simple since we created the files already, so it was basically just operating the Prusa. We accidentally made the first print too small, but it ended up being a good way to find a final size for our piece and see that the detail was preserved even at a small size. The second print was the size that we wanted, so we decided to use that to create the mold.

4. Create Mold

To create the mold, we used our pieces that we just 3D printed and hot glued cardboard around the sides to create a box to pour the material in. We performed a water test on each of our boxes to make sure none of the material would spill out when we poured it. Once we had both boxes ready, we began to pour our mold.

5. Pour 8 Chess Pieces 

After our mold was done, we secured both sides of the mold together with a block of wood and rubber bands. We poured the liquid plastic into the mold and let it set, and did this 8 times. Below is a photo of the final product.

Cost Estimate

For this project, we used filament for the 3D printers, which we will estimate on the high end to cost $5. We will estimate that the mold cost $20, and the liquid plastic that created our chess pieces cost $15. We probably spent around 6 hours total working on this project, bringing the cost of labor to around $70. This brings the total cost of this project to $110.

 

Reflection

Overall this was a fun project that let us see a lot of different tools come together. We both enjoyed working on it, and are proud of the final product.