This past week was one of fixing and adjusting our ideas as we move forward. Our main goals were to:
1) CAD and CAM the molds for another camera piece,
2) machine those molds, and
3) injection mold to test our previous set of molds —
but we ended up hitting (and resolving) a few other roadblocks along the way.
Diann and Lisa started off by trying to test injection molding with the body molds, but many attempts and tries revealed that the diameter of the slot did not match up with the diameter of the cavity. They took the necessary measurements and realized that that we could machine slightly more off of the slot to hopefully fit the molds together perfectly, and will reattempt injection molding next time they go in to lab.
Srimayi had created the CAM for the core mold on the camera bottom piece, so she and Albert got to work on machining the mold.
During lab, they broke both their first and second tool as the mold was nearly completed 😢but also learned through some measurements that their piece did not match the CAM. During the first adaptive pass, the z-axis must not have been set correctly, as the mold was taller than anticipated, causing subsequent tools to plunge deeply into metal and break. After running into other problems with Fusion crashing (and not saving) and re-doing the CAM for the piece, they ran the same adaptive path (figure above) one more time. This time, much more metal came off and the next finishing steps were easy to execute. So the core mold is completed!
One other important step for this week was to finalize and order the necessary dowel pins and magnets. When talking to Joe about dowel pins and how they might work, we realized that our size — 0.075"— isn't exactly a common size and that we might run into issues finding correctly sized pins for our pegs. As we were unable to find this size pin, we instead changed our pin size to 5/64", or 0.078". Fortunately, this only require slight changes to our CAD models.
Though we didn't make as much progress as we'd hoped, we were able to learn some pretty important things. We broke (and fixed) our first tool, made design changes based on resources, and honed our CAM skills, learning some important tools (no axial stock to leave, multiple depths, flat area detection). We're diving in next week to get chugging on more molds, and hopefully will create our thermoform die in parallel!
1) CAD and CAM the molds for another camera piece,
2) machine those molds, and
3) injection mold to test our previous set of molds —
but we ended up hitting (and resolving) a few other roadblocks along the way.
Diann and Lisa started off by trying to test injection molding with the body molds, but many attempts and tries revealed that the diameter of the slot did not match up with the diameter of the cavity. They took the necessary measurements and realized that that we could machine slightly more off of the slot to hopefully fit the molds together perfectly, and will reattempt injection molding next time they go in to lab.
Srimayi had created the CAM for the core mold on the camera bottom piece, so she and Albert got to work on machining the mold.
One other important step for this week was to finalize and order the necessary dowel pins and magnets. When talking to Joe about dowel pins and how they might work, we realized that our size — 0.075"— isn't exactly a common size and that we might run into issues finding correctly sized pins for our pegs. As we were unable to find this size pin, we instead changed our pin size to 5/64", or 0.078". Fortunately, this only require slight changes to our CAD models.
Though we didn't make as much progress as we'd hoped, we were able to learn some pretty important things. We broke (and fixed) our first tool, made design changes based on resources, and honed our CAM skills, learning some important tools (no axial stock to leave, multiple depths, flat area detection). We're diving in next week to get chugging on more molds, and hopefully will create our thermoform die in parallel!
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