Designing and 3D printing molds

I did this assignment together with Kaz. After some brainstorming we decided to do an alligator themed project. We both made a mold separately, for the mold that is closed and consists of two parts, we made together and it was also more difficult to do.

The idea for the mold i will create is an alligator in the water where you only will see a little of his head, back and tail. I want to make it as detailed as possible so you kan see the eyes, nose and spikes.

Kaz will make a design from the skeleton of an alligator.

Alligator in Fusion360

I used this image as a starting point.

Image source: https://zooz.wiki/nl/animals/alligator/

First i used the pen tool to draw the shapes and by extruding it i gave it a height.

Then I shaped the edges so it will sort of look like it's half above water. Afterwards i started with the spikes on the back. I was not happy yet with the spikes on the back so i deleted them afterwards and did them over later.

Because this will be made to create a mold i need to create something that will hold all the parts together, so i made a big circle.

Now i will try to make the spikes on the back and the tail.

The spikes took a long time to create because I had to make them one by one.

I also made some spikes on the back of its head.

The hardest part was to make the eyes and the nose, I had to do this over multiple times. I was satisfied with the eyes but less with the nose.

The final result with the eyes and nose:

When you're done with designing in Fusion360, make sure you save your file as a .stl file. So later you can open this file in Cura to prepare it for 3D printing.

3D printing the alligators

For the molds that Kaz and me created separately we teamed up with Desiree and Thijs because their mold were ready to print as well. Desiree put all our designs together in Cura to start the printing.

Desiree sent me this photo before printing and asked me if I was okay with this:

Due private circumstances I couldn't come early to the Makerslab and Kaz was there before me. He sent me a photo of how far the printing was:

When I arrived at school the 3D printer was this far:

The printing would take a total of 13 hours. In the meantime Kaz and me designed the two-piece mold.

Here are a few pictures from the progress of the printing:

The designs from Kaz and me were done before the ones from Desiree and Thijs because their design was bigger in height.

I was very happy with the details of the design I've made. The spikes, eyes and nose were clearly visible.

2-piece mold in Fusion360

Because Kaz and me are doing an alligator themed project we wanted to design a mold for a part from an alligator. The mold will have to be cast later, so we have chosen to make an eyeball from an alligator. The eyeball is a geometric shape.

We took this as a starting point for designing the eye in Fusion360:

Source: Pinterest.

In Fusion360 we created a new file and made a cube first that is going to be the mold.

I renamed the cube into "mal" in the browser under "Bodies" and clicked on the eye to hide it.

After this I made a sphere.

With the pen tool i drawn the pupil.

One by one I've made the lines in the eyes. This took a while to do.

The hardest part was while extruding we wanted for the pupil and the lines to round with the eyeball. This was hard to do but with some help from Sander and Kaj it all worked out.

For the rest of the mold we followed along with this tutorial:

We did exactly everything what is said in the tutorial but with our own design. The only difference is dat we made two holes in it, one for casting and the other for the air. Kaj advised us to do it that way.

Meanwhile we were following the tutorial, the eyeball and the cube we created in the beginning had to be combined so we did that. Afterwards I had to subtract the eyeball from the cube so there is an empty space inside the cube in the shape of the eyeball.

Afterwards i split the cube in two parts so we can make four balls that the mold will be able to keep closed in its place. After splitting and creating the balls I subtracted the balls on the side with the pupil so it will be able to close it.

Next thing we had to do was to make the casting hole and the extra hole for the airflow that Kaj advised us to do. The hole for the air had also to be smaller than the casting hole.

We finished the tutorial we followed and Sander gave us feedback. He said that a piece of the top and bottom could be removed in connection with the printing. Otherwise we would be wasting material and we haven't tought about that. On both the pieces I've set a plane and removed the unnecessary space.

This was the final result:

Printing the mold

I saved the the two parts seperately as .stl files and opened it in Cura. This time with printing we teamed up with Summer and Britt who where ready to print as well. We allready had set up the settings for printing while we also had to wait for the file from the others.

We used the Ultimaker 2 Extended+ because that was the only available 3D printer. We have set that in the settings.

We had a little help from Sander with setting the print settings. The settings we used here below:

After we received the file from Summer and Britt we imported it, set it in place and saved the file as .gcode and put the file on a SD-card. This time we used gold colored PLA.

Before printing it is important to clean the plate where it will be printing on and spraying it with 3DLAC.

After everything was done Kaz prepared the file in the 3D printer for printing and had it printed at night.