Working on a mold for the compression molding machine. There are many ways and materials to create molds from. Personally i like to work with metal and welding simply because those are the tools we have available. i’m trying to make sort of a fruit bowl. Made of a mold and a counter-mold, they are heated and pressed together with shredded plastic inbetween. After a while its baked. Might sound a bit abstract but got it clear in my head, let’s make.
Welded everything together, added some reinforcement and finally some guiders to make sure the mold goes straight down when its pressed. Ready for a testrun!
@xxxolivierxxx@davehakkens what kind of mold to use, what to make, and dimensions of a mold is vast and interesting topic all together as most of us don’t know what else useful things one can make using these machines.
anyone using a mold should post pictures and drawings of their mold to help everyone else or more accurately lessen the load on imagination
This machine is build from a normal household oven. However we did customize it by adding a better temperature controller which is more accurate. Wouldn’t recommend to use the oven you are cooking in though, get another one from the scrapyard for a couple of bucks to experiment with.
Hey Dave,
What kind of oven are you using? do you think it would aslo be possible with a regular oven used for cooking food? Great work, i’m very interested.
Paul
Method seems to work! Still a bit rough, but overall it’s pretty solid and robust. It wasn’t fully molten all the way around, probably because the oven doesn’t get hot enough at the bottom. Next time we will place it a little bit of the bottom.
This is what it looked like before and after heating the mold in the oven. Turns out i’ve added a bit to much plastic in the mold. So it leaked after pressing/heating. Shouldn’t be a big problem to finish up properly and for next time, less plastic…