Aluminum Casting with 3D printed Patterns

this is one of the steering wheels off of the old carnival ride that we're restoring and uh can't get these anymore and I need quite a few of them for this project so this week I'm back on our steering wheel project I am trying to make a 3D model of this old steering wheel so that I can 3D print it and then use that as a pattern for casting an aluminum so it's important to me that I can get this turned out I am super excited about this I've been working on this model for like three months now I mean not continuously but I've tried on three different occasions not only did I get the model done but I got it sliced the way I want it to see if we have any bed leveling problems here doing a circle is a great way to tell if you are adhering to the bed properly so this is going to be a seven plus hour print it's done in four separate sections I forget if I oversized that to 106 percent shoot gotta go check all right take two we forgot to enlarge it to 106 percent we need to do that would have been very disappointing spend all that time printing only to be printing it at the wrong size all right we're laying down plastic some people in the past have asked me about my printer and this is just a a really cheap Ender 3 printer from the first year it came out so I believe it was about 189 dollars and all I've done is put it inside of a an Ikea table and in order the table was not quite tall enough so we had to make some standoff spacers for all four corners to hold it up and that gives it the height it needs those uh those spacers is a pattern you can you can download from thingiverse the handle the hinges all of these were part of the kit to do this you just need to buy the table and then print these brackets out put the whole thing together and then I've got uh some quarter inch plywood on all four sides and then I have insulation on the inside I disconnected all the electronics that would normally be on the side and on the front of it got them all outside so they don't get affected by the Heat this enclosure regularly gets up to about 110 150 degrees inside to there and that helps the ABS that I'm using to stick to the build surface better it just feeds on top it's on rollers and then I have a dehydrator here that I can use to dry the filament actually I want to put a fitting right in the side here and get some rollers that can handle the heat and I can feed straight from the dehydrator into the cabinet let's start at printing these These are going to be locating holes so that the top half of the pattern can join the bottom half of the pattern we get proper registration [Music] I'm gonna go in that room yeah no it's going to be a long time yet you'll be in bed when it's done okay [Music] okay that's my lathe yeah down puppy 16 humidity and 122 degrees I think that may just be about the hottest I've ever seen it in there there you go it's going to need quite a bit of sanding to get these two to mesh properly the outside looks pretty good this will take a little filling and sanding on here this is pretty good back here just the normal sanding and priming so apparently this piece is called a follow board and it's going to be used to support one half of the pattern while the sand is being rammed up and at the same time it's going to be creating a recess that once it's removed the other half of the pattern will fit down into it's going to save me a lot of time that I don't have to be coping down to the wheel well there it is took uh three and a half hours to print that and I'll bet that's going to be tough to get off that platform oh well I was easier than I expected so I bought this set of dowel pins and it arrived just all scrambled up but what I wanted them for was a way to pin these two halves of the steering wheel together I think they're going to work just fine for that these are just for alignment those will go in there that'll line that right up but we have a lot of sanding to do before we're ready for that part but my focus right now is sanding in here to get these two surfaces to mate together better foreign that's already looking better that's just right so there's the wheel just need to do a lot of sanding so I don't know how long I've been sanding this but it's been quite a while and now I need to wash it off see what it actually looks like and get some primer on it while that first side is drying I'll sort out these dowel pins foreign much better this top surface here is what's going to need the most filling it's where you can really see the layer lines this is how we're looking after filling and sanding we need a little more right in here let's see that's dry looks like we are ready for paint let that dry turn it over do the other side it's finally time to start ramming this up this is our new two-piece pattern pinned together hopefully this is going to work for us I gotta get these pins out of here this is uh what's known as a follow board it's designed to support these thinner sections up here that might get damaged when we're pounding the sand in but it does another thing now if you remember back to the first time that I tried to Ram this up using the original wheel as a pattern one of the things I had to do was I had to after ramming it up I had to dig down into the sand to find The Parting line hopefully this is going to prevent all of that foreign well I gotta say that's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for foreign a little bit of break out there not completely happy with that not perfect but we can make it work but can we make this work [Music] oh well that's not what I wanted to happen at all back to the drawing board [Music] foreign [Music] this is what we didn't do last time I didn't try to take this out that looks pretty good a few things are working out really well this is working out great and these pins for alignment are working out great so we got that going for us I think that might have been a key part we missed last time we didn't make sure we could get the first part of the pattern out of the mold foreign [Music] we must have a little bit of an undercut there because we keep getting that that little Breakaway that can be taken care of with a grinder and I still want to put a well in here [Music] I'll buy that now we need to vent this this is going to be the top so I want to vent each spoke [Music] that is ready for pouring as soon as our metal gets up to temperature that's what we'll do foreign will tell about half an hour has passed we can probably pull that mold in here see what we've got so we didn't have enough metal to actually come up the screw to fill it so I'm a little concerned well that doesn't look bad The Hub is a little dirty looking yeah the wheel felt better than I expected I just need a little bit more metal to make this work nicely [Music] so it's been a pretty successful week I've actually got four of these steering wheels done and they're in different stages of preparation I tried sandblasting a few to see what that would look like this one here is still raw has to be cut off and bored but that's the four we need for the first ride car so that's kind of a milestone as far as I'm concerned didn't take that long I've got it down to about 45 minutes from beginning to end from the time that I turned the furnace on and I start ramming up the sand until it's ready to pour and then another 15 minutes to cool so an hour total is about what it takes so uh I'm pretty happy with that is this is one of those things that I can do one every day after work and in a few weeks time I'll have them all done we know that we can do it now and this is not a perfect reproduction of the original the webs in the center here are a bit bigger but I'm okay with that I think overall it's going to do the job and uh pretty pleased with it actually so I'll finish getting these machined and then get them powder coated and move on to another part of this project and if you want to follow along click that link to the left and come along for the ride

Channel: Pete Rondeau

Views: 3,588

Keywords: Pete Rondeau, Glory Days Amusements, Aluminum Casting at home, sand casting aluminum at home, aluminum casting 3d print, 3d printed patterns for metal casting, 3d printing casting patterns, reproduction vintage, vintage and reproduction, kiddie ride, aluminum casting, 3d printed patterns, King amusement Company, sand casting, casting aluminum, metal casting 3d prints, metal casting at home, sand casting 3d printed parts, casting aluminum at home

Id: ffJHMQq3vPw

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023