Mold Tutorial Help

[thebaconbits]

Hi everyone,
Well I've been going through the forum and online tutorials on how to create a mold, but I was hoping that someone would be able to do a step by step tutorial on a basic part.
I'd like to create a mold of the blade inside the cube and split the cube into a core and cavity. If possible, I'd like to split the blade from the front leading edge to the trailing edge, i.e. the chord.
Hopefully this will help others who are also looking to do something similar.
Thanks!

[Toolmaker96]

Funny, looks like a wing to me.

[mmckell]

I can't open your file as i'm using SW2008 but i do this stuff a 2 or3 times a month. For me, this is the easiest way to create a mold cavity.
Create a plane or planes that run through the split lines of your finished part and save your part
open a new part and create your mold stock - center your drawing on the origin and extrude "mid plane" - this keeps your planes in the center of your mold, creating the mold split lines - save your mold stock. Open an assembly - drag your mold stock into the assembly origin - drag your part into the assembly and mate using your planes to center it in your mold and save your assembly. Edit your mold stock inside the assembly (right click and edit). click on the cavity icon in the mold tools bar - pick your part for the cavity, add your shrink factor, click the check and your cavity is now inside the mold. exit the part edit - save the assembly and close the assembly. Open the mold stock part and "save as copy" with section names as many times as the amount of mold sections you need to create the finished part. close the original mold part and open your first mold section. Cut extrude from the planes until you have the first section/core. Add your trim lines and doweling holes and your done. Do the same for the remaining sections. to check your alignment - create a new assembly and drag and drop your mold sections into it. you can make any changes needed inside the assembly to keep the mold aligned.

i'm not an expert but this is the easiest way for me
for simple 2 section molds I can usually model, create, CAM and start cutting the mold within the first day.


hope this helps
Mac

[thebaconbits]

Mac,
Thanks for the guide. I will try this out on a simple part to get a better understanding of what you have described. Thanks for taking the time to help.

[mattpatt]

This thread seems to have come at the right time, as I'm having trouble with a part that I need a mold for.

I haven't had too much of an issue this far as I've used the mold tools, and everything has been reasonably smooth. But this part doesn't seem to work. I can create the parting line, but when I come to generate the parting surfaces it all goes wrong. It seems to miss some small sections of the 'parting line' out so I don't get a complete parting surface.

I'm in the process of trying to create boundary surfaces and then knit them together, but this didn't appear to work either. I got the surfaces surrounding the part, but when I came to make the tooling split it said it couldn't knit surfaces together.

I'm thinking there's something wrong with my model, even though it seems to make generate the parting line without grief.

I guess it's a little difficult without seeing the part, but can anyone throw any light on this? Maybe someone has had a similar problem.

The part is a SW 2007 file. I can post it up if anyone has some free time to take a look. It would be a huge help as it's basically one side of a pair of parts. I've already made the mold and the opposite part (which came out lovely by the way), but not having the opposing piece is really holding things up.

Regards,

Matt.

[mattpatt]

Well, I got a tad annoyed with my part that wouldn't work, and changed a few things and bingo. within an hour I'd designed the mold and started the CAM work.

The problem was my rather dodgy designing :-)

My only excuse is that I'm venturing into surfaces (as opposed to solids) and I'm still struggling. But happy to say that I'm getting there.

The part was a bit of a mess with solids and surfaces but managed to smooth things out. I'm happy.