[Jewelry making - Article 00247] - Re: [Orchid] CAD/CAM and CNC milling

[Robert Hood]

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>     I sent a machined master to two different casters requesting that
>     a rubber model be made and 10 pieces be cast (in silver).  Both
>     batches came back with different problems - wax distortion,
>     excessive clean-up, air bubbles, etc. that resulted in excessive
>     clean-up.  These experiences have made me question the ability to
>     job out work and receive the quality that I require. 

    It's possible that some of the problems may be due to the design of
    your prototypes themselves. some designs are very difficult to inject
    without air bubbles in some areas of the piece. If you are not
    familiar with the principles of casting, the design of your pieces
    may be contributing to porosity in some areas of the castings.

>     I don't really want to set up my own casting facility at this
>     time. My thinking is that I could produce individual waxes using a
>     CNC mill and then send them away to be cast - presuming that a
>     completed wax sent to a caster would fare better in regards to
>     quality control. 

    I am using a Taig mill. Most of my designs take several hours or
    more to mill. It wouldn't be economically practical to do production
    volume waxes with a milling machine uunless the retail prices of the
    pieces were many hundreds of dollars apiece. I do quite a few one-off
    pieces on my mill but add $100 or more to the price of the work for
    milling the wax. I think others may charge more than this for milling
    but my studio is in a fish processing plant.... Another problem with
    doing production waxes on a milling machine is that you would have
    to use a high resolution in the milling in order to reduce the
    finishing time. This would make the milling of each piece slower
    again. 

>     As well, I have heard varying thoughts on Model Master - the steep
>     price tag as well as ease of use. Any thoughts?  Keep in mind that
>     I am unlikely to be very adept at configuring a system from
>     scratch. 

    I use Rhino for CAD, Desk Proto for my CAM and a CNC Taig machine
    for milling. The Taig machine isn't pretty but it's accurate, rugged
    , dependable and inexpensive. The system worked beautifully right out
    of the crate. The snag is the software, not the milling machine. I
    probably spent a hundred hours doing tutorials in Rhino before I was
    happy with the models I was producing. ArtCam and some of the other
    expensive software are probably a lot easier to learn but cost maybe
    ten times as much. 

cheers, Robert Hood 

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