In this series, "Letters from the Fab Academy," Shawn Wallace, member of AS220, the Providence, RI community arts space, shares his experiences with the Fab Academy, a distributed learning collaborative, built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. -- Gareth
Mold making and casting By Shawn Wallace
Noah Bedford from the Providence Fab Lab made this flexible spider coupling for use in one of the machines built in the lab.
This week's topic, mold making and casting, came as a welcome change from the previous two-week session (embedded programming), which was creating a bit of anxiety here at the Fab Academy. The materials and processes for molding and casting are easy to learn and yield satisfying results; programming microcontrollers can be satisfying in its own way, but is a more intractable topic to learn in two weeks. The assignment this time around was to model an object, machine a positive mold, then cast a flexible urethane mold that could be used to make multiple objects in a variety of materials.
Here are a few samples of the work created in the class:
Food-friendly silicone molds can be made to cast edibles, like these candies, modeled by Susanna Tesconi in Barcelona.