PokéPawns

• Chloe Hsieh

Hello, world! Chloe and Kiran here, bringing you our final project and blog post of the year!

We both have a bit of a penchant for Pokémon, so we decided to combine the classic Pokéball shape with a pawn piece for this final project. After designing our first iteration in TinkerCAD, we realized that some of the parts might be too delicate to cast, so we replaced the pawn base with something sturdier.

first iteration

second (final) iteration half and mold base

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we imported our design to SolidWorks to create the mold base and 3D-printed the positive base. After calculating the volume of our piece via water displacement, we poured the silicone mold over our 3D-printed positive piece. This was all fairly uncomplicated. Peace and love.

water displacement

box of indeterminate size (full circle moment)

3D-printed positive half

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then designed our CNC side and imported the file to VCarve. There was some deliberation on how to secure the large wood piece to the CNC machine, as it was intent on freeing itself from the clamps. We reviewed some of the past blog posts, which suggested drilling holes for the clamps to lock in to, but this seemed sort of jank and unreliable at best. In the end, we settled with dots of hot glue, which worked astonishingly well. 

Another issue we ran into was that we chose the treated wood, which was tinged slightly green. It had the unfortunate issue of looking rather diseased, but we assumed it would have no effect on our finished product. This proved to be untrue as we unearthed our CNC piece and found parts of it flaking off in a most unattractive way. We attempted to sand it a bit, but then realized that it may not fit flush with the 3D silicone half if we proceeded. After deciding that we could just put more effort into post-processing, we moved onto the next step.

cnc file

most normal cnc wood

We poured the silicone mold over our CNC positive piece, then waited for it to dry. Unfortunately, there were some slight miscalculations, because when we freed our piece, we discovered that we had placed the pegs on the wrong side (brief intermission as we speedrun the five stages of grief). After some slight scrambling, we assembled some rudimentary pegs made out of dowel pieces and were ready to start casting.

dowels to the rescue

We had a couple false starts in which the two silicone halves were misaligned, but we managed to properly secure our pieces by employing a militia of rubber bands, wood plank supports, and hand clamps. After sanding our polyurethane pieces, our PokéPawns were done!

first attempts

it was quite the process

 

 

 

 

smooooth

clean workspace!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How much did this project cost?

  • Raw materials
  • Tools
    • TinkerCAD
    • SolidWorks
    • VCarve
    • Bambu
    • Shapeoko CNC
    • hand clamps
    • rubber bands
    • plastic cups
    • popsicle sticks
  • Labour
    • $15/hour for somewhat skilled work
    • ~ 15 hours x 2 people: $450

Total: $540.95

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