Thank you very much to everyone who say a few words about my project. The semicircular cuttings are specially done to make the buttons lighter. I have to stop worklog for sometime because I need to prepare about 100 buttons. But if you are interested in my other mods I’ll be glad to show you some of them which are made earlier.
at first when i saw those buttons i was like you, speechless!!!!!!!! that will be one nice board to use!!!
What just happened with the buttons... it was plastic... he painted in this silver color, and next its in metal?!?!
if you read his mouse log, he (kinda) shows how he casts each plastic part in metal. it is stainless steel.
w00t once polished they look so sweet... making 100+ buttons will take a while so i suggest you all to sit back, relax and.... wait...
he takes the plastic keys and melts small sticks of plastic to them, which he then melts to a base. using an investment molding process, he encapsulates the tree with some medium then pours molten metal into it. the metal melts/burns the plastic away leaving a tree of metal keys. once cooled, he cuts and grinds off the "limbs" of the tree and he now has metal keys that he sands and polishes. i hope this cleared some things up. the finished ones really do look amazing, great job man!
I thought for lost mold casting or whatever its called, they put the stuff in a ceramic substance, it hardens, then they put it upside down in a kiln to melt out the plastic and solidify the clay, then they pour in molten metal, wait for it to cool, then break the clay off with a hammer. Is that correct? Huge process regardless, I wouldn't be suprised if this didn't take 100 hours just to do the keys!
Very interesting to follow this particular thread since i'm casting myself (though i stick to tin/bronze/silver) The funny thing about this is that here at work I can't see images posted at photobucket (gpo-blocked) but i still get excited just from seeing the red X'es and reading all the posts... A pretty decent testament to Filimon's previous work.
I just got to this forum and am busy checking all the mods out there - this is absolutely amazing!! My question, do you sell the items that you cast like this? For instance, the metal mouse?
I took a trimester of jewelry in the 9th grade, and we did lost wax moldings with the plaster molds. And we would put them in a kiln to melt the wax out. We also lost the molds, we never go to do rubber molds for making the wax plugs, but thats what you do if you wish to replicate your work with one mold. Anyways we took the molds out of the kiln hot, and placed them in the cast thing which was a cool cintrafuge like thing, and the moldwas on its side the crucible was nere the button space, and we melted the metal with a oxy/acetaling torch. right there then bumped the caster to drop the pin that held it, it was a hand wind up, i think my teacher might of made it, it was quite cool, the pin drops then you let the sucker fly, and you wait until it stops turning, then you use tongs and hold the mold into a bucket of water and the cold water reacts to the hot plaster and the plaster breaks and boils apart, if you do it right you can pull the mold pipe out and dump the metal object you just created into your hand, otherwise you lose it to the bucket and have to put your hand in the water and find it. There is also lost foam molds which they use in some engine casting places, read about that in hotrod magazine, but some engines are cast in a sand mold, we did some sand molding in 7th grade, and i got to use a blast furnace for that, pretty cool..
I’m not sure that I’ll be able to describe the process of casting the mouse mod in details but I’ll try. I took an ordinary plastic mouse. Then I divided it into parts so I had a wheel of scrolling , four buttons and other details separately. After that I made one or several holes in each detail to reduce their weight. I filled the holes with hot wax and added some ornamental details from the wax to the details.( As you see the mouse mod is not the exact copy of an ordinary computer mouse. I tried to modify every detail.) Every detail I sank into the cubic content with some special ceramics paste. I waited until the ceramics paste became stiff. Then I heated the content with the paste and the detail in it under the temperature of 600 degrees of C. The wax and the plastic evaporated and inside the ceramics paste you could see the new mould. I poured some hot stainless steel into the mould. When the steel cooled I broke the paste and I had the new steel detail. Then I polished it. As you see I can’t replicate the same mouse again It’s one of a kind. I hope you understand me. Sorry for my bad English.
