Forming and casting

This week was focused on froming and casting. Our goal was to create our own mold, or cast our own object. My goal was to design and cast strap for my final project. I have decided to design my strap in Fusion 360. The design is inspired by Apple watch strap with distintct way of attaching the strap to the electronic part. I have designed two part mold for my strap, easily designed using Combine function in Fusion 360, that was printed on the Průša 3D printer with 0.6 mm nozzle using PET-G filament. The design can be seen below:

For my strap material, I have chosen two different ones, Equinox 38 Medium , a silicone that is easy to work with thanks to its consistency similar to modeling clay. The two parts were easily mixed in a 1:1 ratio, the mold was then filled with the material, and the bracelet was left in a vise for about 40–50 minutes. The result looked promising—the material had good properties suitable for a bracelet. However, I unfortunately made a mistake while molding the shorter part of the bracelet, which made the final product unusable. I therefore had to recast this part.

I have also tried casting bracelet made from Dragon Skin 10 (Fast) material, this material is much more flexible, perhaps too much for my purposes. It was finalized without any error though.