CAD/CAM: Art to Part

How can we injection mold a toy based on a 4th grader’s sketch?

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Skills

Injec­tion Mold­ing • CNC • Design for Manufacutirng/Assembly • CAD Modeling

Project Overview:

           This project is cur­rent­ly in progress. I, along with 3 oth­er stu­dents, are work­ing design­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing a child’s toy from a 4th graders sketch. This ini­tial­ly entailed mod­el­ing the part. From there we cre­at­ed a CNC pro­gram via Nx to machine out the molds. We are cur­rent­ly machin­ing out the molds to be injec­tion molded. 

Personal Responsibilities:

            My main respon­si­bil­i­ty was a sub­assem­bly of the final part – this entails mod­el­ing the part and design­ing the cor­re­spond­ing mold tak­ing account DFMA principles.

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Project

Process

The project start­ed with this beau­ti­ful sketch by Anna, Key­on and Mack — three 4th graders at a local ele­men­tary school.

Based on their draw­ing, we mod­eled the above cup­cake. It has three dis­tinct parts — the can­dle, the frost­ing & the base.

Before mod­el­ing the molds, we 3‑D print­ed our part to visu­al­ize and ver­i­fy it.

After ver­i­fy­ing out CAD mod­els CNC molds were created.

Final­ly the parts were injec­tion molded