I was busy over the weekend doing more work on this; I've got my parents visiting from the east coast from tomorrow night for a few weeks and I've told them they can borrow the daily drive... which means I need the dashboard in the Falcon reassembled tonight. Ha ha.
With that in mind, I made the second half of the mould then had a go casting. I'm using a rigid polyurethane plastic. First attempt didn't go so well. The resin was bit too viscous for such a detailed mould. I couldn't get it completely filled.
Photos added for amusement.
I then modified the mould to have a second fill point and made a few other little changes and had another go.
On initial demoulding it was looking good.
But look a bit closer and there was voids all through it. Another fail.
I was cleaning up last night and realised the other resin I had, which is a little bit less rigid, had a viscosity about 1/6 the first one. One last ditch attempt...
Success!!
There are one or two little bits that aren't 100% perfect, but I know how to fix them next time around. There is still all the flashing and what not to clean off still, I literally pulled it out of the mould as I was walking to the car to go to work; so no time to make it pretty.
I also realise that there is no circuit in these casts - that was deliberate; I (correctly, it seems) figured I would have a couple of trials before I got it right.
This one will (hopefully) go in the car tonight and get me on the road for a couple of weeks while the folks are here; then I'll do myself one with a circuit. I might even track down a different resin between now and then with the higher rigidity and the lower viscosity.
In case anything unforseen goes wrong, I've also printed myself another unit (with space for a circuit board) in PETG - which offers a higher strength, flexibility and temperature stability than the PLA the first ones were printed from.
Any which way, the falcon is getting back on the road tonight, and that's cause for celebration in itself!! Ha ha.