Riser's Vampire Master

Creating the Vampire Master Casting Model

This page documents a few experiments done with the Roland software during the creation of the final Vampire Model Casting Master. This is for a product that I will be introducing in the Fall of 2009. The machining was done with blue machinable wax. The goal was to created a wax master for producing latex molds for casting.

The master file and design work were created in Blender by my younger son, Matt.

The master stl file is for a 360 degree vampire model. I will only deal with a front view for my product requirements. Other future products will deal with a full model.

This is the master file.

Here are a couple close up images of the detail.

Here is the rendered file.

As you can see, it is rather detailed.

The final model will only be 4" long by 1.25" wide by .7" thick. It is hoped that too much detail will not be lost at this small size.

To begin, the 1.5" x 3" x 7" wax block was clamped onto the machining table.

Machining was begun using "contours" for the surface as I wanted to see what the outcome would be.

Things went fine until the very end of the roughing cycle. At the scale desired, the model would be just under .9" thick. I had set up the machine to go to this full depth. Even though I had set up for sloped sides for tool clearance, the tool rubbed too much on the verticle sides of the model causing a wax build up on the cutter.

As if this was not bad enough, the machine started to drill random holes in the wax. I believe this is due to the software trying to deal with the back side of the model. Anyway, one block of wax ruined; but much learned.

I next decided to only machine to a depth of .7" which would be fine for my needs. Still testing the contour cutting, I obtained this result for the roughing cuts.

This was not going to do what I really wanted. The contours are way too obvious.