One Up Chess Piece! | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

For our final Emmie, Alessa and I teamed up to create a chess piece of a one-up mushroom from Super Mario Brothers.

In order to get the sizing correct, we eventually landed on sizing a 3D print of our desired piece at about 3 inches tall.

(pictures are not ours, for reference from thingiverse)

From here we put our piece through MeshMixer and SolidWorks to create positives for our molds. We had to create two seperate “cuts” in MeshMixer, as our piece was not perfectly symmetrical (one for the front and one for the back).

We decided to use the 3D print of front half for the 3D printed positive, as we figured that the 3D printer would be able to capture the fine detail of the eyes on the front of the mushroom better than the CNC machine could.

To CNC the back half of the piece, we used the same measurements that we did for the 3D printed positive, however, we made the base thinner, as we figured that we did not need our base to be as thick to achieve the same results (adjusted from ~0.5 in to ~0.125in). We struggled to CNC our piece, as we ran into several technical difficulties with the dimensions of our piece and the machines and bits (bit could not reach deep enough into the piece to cut the part, piece holding the bit in machine would bump into the wood at a certain depth, etc.), however, we were eventually able to maneuver our way to a successful print.

We then taped cardboard around our positives and poured silicone over them to create our molds. When they dried, we cast polyurethane 305 into our mold, using white, yellow, blue and green to color the plastic.

Once all the polyurethane casted dried, we post processed them. The rough edges and notch where we poured in the polyurethane on each mushroom was cut off and sanded away, and then were individually spray painted.