This weeks assignment was to machine a wax block to make a mold and cast it.
One of the main advantage of making a mold compared to other processes is the ease in making multiple copies of the object by casting. I thought of making some kind of a form that can form a pattern or interlock with itself. This made me think of trouchet tiles, these are square tiles that are not rotationally symmetric, this allows them to form various patterns by arranging them in a pattern. I find this specific pattern very fascinating
Although these are 2D patterns, I was curious about creating a 3d tile pattern using something like this. After looking at images of tiles on the web and playing around with patterns in illustrator, I setteled on the following pattern
I then created the tile in Fusion360 and tried out making the pattern as well as a 3d printed mold.
After this I went to the shop and used the shopbot CNC to mill the mold out of a block of wax. I created the rough and finishing pass. the machining took 15 min of machine time.
Next day, I went to the CBA shop, removed the molds made with oomoo 30 liquid rubber, then mixed hydrostone powder with water and poured into both the molds, let it set for 30 min and took them out
the one on the left is from the cnc milled mold mold whereas the next one is from 3d printed mold mold, the CNC milled one has better finish