I'm finally back in action, so here's the news--
This is the master for the Aries ceiling. This is actually built as a negative-- the contours are all in reverse. This is due to the way the real ceiling was padded. I had to take a bit of liberty and spread out the divisions a bit, but the end result will look great. So--
This is the mold made off the master. You can see how the divisions and lighting panels are now inset. The next step (no photo, sorry...) is to coat this with mold release and make a rubber mold from it. This is so I can generate this--
Here we have a urethane part. This still needs work before it becomes the final master for the ceiling, but you can see all the contours and other details. This part had to be generated this way to insure nothing got screwed up. Imagine having to scribe all those lines over all those contours without something going wrong! It was much safer to build it in reverse and take the extra steps to arrive at this final part.
The final version of this will be completely circular, which will take me about another week.
Progress on the Big D CM/ CM Kit--
Here you see (from left to right) the mold core, mold jacket and exterior mold. And the first complete casting!
You will notice this casting has some banding. In a casting of this size, since its difficult to judge how much resin to use, this one was poured in several small batches instead of one large one. I added tint so we could see how far a certain amount of resin would go. We learned a lot of things while making this part. I need to fix some features on the mold before we can really start pouring these out. Some of this has to do with making it easier to get the part out of the mold. It took 2 of us, working with all our strength, about 10 minutes to get the part out. Collapsing that mold core is NOT easy!
Scott
This is the master for the Aries ceiling. This is actually built as a negative-- the contours are all in reverse. This is due to the way the real ceiling was padded. I had to take a bit of liberty and spread out the divisions a bit, but the end result will look great. So--
This is the mold made off the master. You can see how the divisions and lighting panels are now inset. The next step (no photo, sorry...) is to coat this with mold release and make a rubber mold from it. This is so I can generate this--
Here we have a urethane part. This still needs work before it becomes the final master for the ceiling, but you can see all the contours and other details. This part had to be generated this way to insure nothing got screwed up. Imagine having to scribe all those lines over all those contours without something going wrong! It was much safer to build it in reverse and take the extra steps to arrive at this final part.
The final version of this will be completely circular, which will take me about another week.
Progress on the Big D CM/ CM Kit--
Here you see (from left to right) the mold core, mold jacket and exterior mold. And the first complete casting!
You will notice this casting has some banding. In a casting of this size, since its difficult to judge how much resin to use, this one was poured in several small batches instead of one large one. I added tint so we could see how far a certain amount of resin would go. We learned a lot of things while making this part. I need to fix some features on the mold before we can really start pouring these out. Some of this has to do with making it easier to get the part out of the mold. It took 2 of us, working with all our strength, about 10 minutes to get the part out. Collapsing that mold core is NOT easy!
Scott
