And as you’ll see soon, I’ll wish I had done that. If I would’ve trimmed the under part of the clay (where the draft angle is), 2.5k probably would’ve been enough. Turns out, not quite enough so I made another. So I started with 2.5k to see how that would go. If you have some left over, you made too much”. I even asked EC if there was a calculation method to help me get close and their response was basically “make some. There are no instructions for how much resin to make for this. I made up my first batch of casting resin…actually, let’s stop here for a sec. Also, I’m not good at measuring, so my shell was a bit… weird. I had to use some clay to 'level off' some bits that probably would have made extraction from the mold difficult as well. I didn’t really have a reference (other than their video) for how much clay to leave below my piece, and in hindsight, I probably could’ve cut that in half…and made it actually level. Per the EC video, next up was filling the inside with clay and creating the shell for the mold. Again, sanded it down until it was smooth enough for me. The extra coating hopefully has the added benefit of helping lessen the adhesion when I create my mold (Narrator: it did not). So, I sanded it down again and added another, thinner coat. I applied a coat of that, which turned out to be too thick and not applied very well. Because I’m impatient and don’t really know what I’m doing, I used “Promise Clear Table top Epoxy Resin”. Even after alot of dremeling and sanding, I wasn’t happy with the result.

The original part was a 3d printed PA-CF part, that had some pretty harsh layer lines.

I did run into some…issues during the process. Trigger warning: Some things in this post might make you cringe, or just laugh at my fumbling attempts at doing a CF. The part is a controller box for a onewheel, based off the the WTFoc design. Here's my first CF piece using chopped tow and compression molding per the Easy Composites videos. Easy Composites (EC, from here on out) makes it seem so dang easy! And mostly it is.

Shapr3d for woodworking