Jewellery development - brass medals for the anti robot people

Jewellery development - Sand casting

Sand casting our badges- We used the 3D printed model as a master pattern for our sand casting moulds. We had decided to cast in brass as it was cheaper than silver. However we encounter a number of problems. It was difficult to calculate the amount of brass lemel needed, this was because the nylon of the 3D printed model has a different specific gravity to wax and it was not possible to find out the SP of the nylon. The second problem was medal flow within the sand mould, we try positioning the master model in various ways but without success. The third problem was that brass cools very quickly and the cold sand mould hindered this even more. The fouth problem was that brass generally doesn't like to flow very well in it's molten state and given we were just pouring the medal into the mould we had to rely on gravity to pull the medal down into the mould. We also tried with pewter. This yielded better results, however still not at a good enough standard. Our solution was to invest the two 3D printed models and cast them using the centrifugal casting machine. We had also decided to have our design laser cut in perspex.

Development of Jewlery

Images showing the open sand casting moulds and Ivan and Nicky at the Forge melting brass.

Jewellery development

This is a variation on the last design. It has more similarities to the first badge design that we had printed.

jewellery development

Images showing the failures of the 3D printed badges. We have made three attempts thus far. The first was a quick 20 minute print, followed by a longer 1hour print and then a print with supports.

jewellery development

Due to the technical limitations of the animation 3D printer I have had the simplify the model.It has a flat top surface, but still can have the perspex fitted from the back.

Jewelry Development

Just for interest sake and as a back up plan I uploaded our STL badge file to Shapeways. It gives you a run down of cost and material compatibility.

The final design with dimensions. It's 44mm x 41mm x 5.86mm.

jewellery

Working on design ideas for our Badge.

 Above is our final design. Going to hopefully get it 3D printed.