Aluminum fixture for cutting molds

[rcferguson]

Jul 19, 2020 6:13:30 GMT greggtwep16 said:

Nov 23, 2019 21:23:37 GMT rcferguson said:

Finished another 3-part mold. This one is to make levers for my mini-quadrant. I ran it yesterday and made enough parts for the 10 boards I have made up. Working on the mold for the chassis now, and then one for the knobs.

     

I love this thread, your work is very inspiring! I recently started down the path you took for one of my projects in a similar manner (m3 instead of carve king and powerlab model 660 instead of the LNS 150a). In hindsight anything you would of done differently or things to watch out for? I've ordered the bits you mentioned earlier in the thread and will likely stick with the handle for a little while as long as I can pull hard enough (with an extension pipe). Did you do any molds with thin walls and if so was filling the mold doable or did you have to stick with molds with larger cavities?

To be honest, I have given up doing molds... I just could not get consistent results with my Carve King. The Z axis will randomly plunge way too low, and after putting 20-30 hours into a mold and having it destroyed by a random plunge I got frustrated with it. Also the precision just isn't consistent...  X and Y would periodically be off, and while I know that 10 thousandths is probably good enough for my molds, having it off by 50-100 randomly was just too much for me. Don't get me wrong...I still love my Carve King, but I've concluded that it's just not the right machine for that kind of precision work. On the brighter side, I am using it a lot to cut wood, and I've been pleased with the results. My longest part is about 20 minutes, and if something happens partway through It's not a big deal to discard the bad part and start over. I'm just doing 2 dimensional cuts anyway, and so the Z isn't as important here.

Here's my latest project...all the plywood parts are cut on my Carve King. Soon to be available on my Etsy site:

[Bruce]

so have you abandoned the injection molding process, Rob? Or have you found an alternative source for custom molds?

Great looking lever control box!

[rcferguson]

Oct 5, 2020 1:40:47 GMT Bruce said:

so have you abandoned the injection molding process, Rob? Or have you found an alternative source for custom molds?

Great looking lever control box!

For now I'm 3D printing all my parts. Will get back to injection molding eventually, but I'm trying to work with the tools I've got for now.

[VGCustomShop]

Super impressive work - way to go man!

[rcferguson]

Oct 28, 2020 8:35:39 GMT VGCustomShop said:

Super impressive work - way to go man!

Thanks! All my stuff is available for the DIY flight sim enthusiast on my Etsy page, and some on Amazon.

[mattjfanguy]

Oct 4, 2020 21:00:18 GMT rcferguson said:

Jul 19, 2020 6:13:30 GMT greggtwep16 said:

I love this thread, your work is very inspiring! I recently started down the path you took for one of my projects in a similar manner (m3 instead of carve king and powerlab model 660 instead of the LNS 150a). In hindsight anything you would of done differently or things to watch out for? I've ordered the bits you mentioned earlier in the thread and will likely stick with the handle for a little while as long as I can pull hard enough (with an extension pipe). Did you do any molds with thin walls and if so was filling the mold doable or did you have to stick with molds with larger cavities?

To be honest, I have given up doing molds... I just could not get consistent results with my Carve King. The Z axis will randomly plunge way too low, and after putting 20-30 hours into a mold and having it destroyed by a random plunge I got frustrated with it. Also the precision just isn't consistent...  X and Y would periodically be off, and while I know that 10 thousandths is probably good enough for my molds, having it off by 50-100 randomly was just too much for me. Don't get me wrong...I still love my Carve King, but I've concluded that it's just not the right machine for that kind of precision work. On the brighter side, I am using it a lot to cut wood, and I've been pleased with the results. My longest part is about 20 minutes, and if something happens partway through It's not a big deal to discard the bad part and start over. I'm just doing 2 dimensional cuts anyway, and so the Z isn't as important here.

Here's my latest project...all the plywood parts are cut on my Carve King. Soon to be available on my Etsy site:

I had the same trouble for a while with the random plunging! It's been almost a year ago since I fixed it and I'm having trouble now remembering what it was I did. I'm going to look into it and see if I can't figure it out again, but I'm almost certain it had to do with updating my version of grbl and UGS.

I'll keep you updated on what I find!