Finally, a Break Through!

Finally! On Wednesday afternoon I managed to get my mould milled! It was all very exciting as I had been waiting for so long for it to happen, also because I'd never really seen the CNC Router in action (I'd heard it before and it was very noisy, but that didn't give me anything to go off). 

My Rhino file had to be exported into another piece of software which mapped the routers paths. Firstly a 'roughing out' path which would kind of sketch in the basic shapes, and then a 'finishing' path which takes a lot longer and makes it look very neat and tidy. You can repeat the last part in order to achieve a higher quality of finish but I was advised against it as it wouldn't have worked for my material. 

Huge CNC router. Tiny square of foam.

The process itself was quite interesting to watch but did go on for what seemed like an age- okay, only really an hour and fifteen minutes. During this time I had to sit beside it to make sure my foam didn't move around so maybe this made it seem longer!

'Roughing' the initial shapes then going back to finish nicely. 

Whilst I was fully prepared for them to have a lower level of detail then initially desired I was in no way expecting the demons if produced. I suppose I must have just not measured something out properly in Rhino, or maybe they didn't loft as well as I had thought. I'm wouldn't say I was disappointed as I still think you can see they're meant to be people; I would say I was a little bit scared..

I thought they would have eyes. 

Detail.

Having seen the finished piece I didn't think taking plaster casts directly from it would work as the details are just too fragile and would just end up in a plastery mess, so I'm going to use silicone. First though, it's going to need a little bit of smoothing out to stop the silicone picking up the lines in the circular bit (you can kind of see them in the photo). 

I feel much better having got this part finished even though I know there is still so many more things to do- most of them with the potential of catastrophe!