Background
Summary
Materials and processes is a class all about working with things we find less familiar, or may not have the opportunity to work with regularly, in this case the goal was to design a mold for a glass piece to be slumped either over or into, with a design on the glass of your own creation as well. In the ideation phase I knew I wanted to be creating a bowl with a rim around it, and I knew I wanted my design on the glass itself to be going around that rim in a repetitive pattern. I chose the purple glass hoping to add mystery to the design of the shadows I had created, unfortunately the glass was much darker in person than it had appeared on the site, so the figures became far less visible.
Process
These molds are cut on our CNC router after being designed in the CAD software of your choice, I used Rhino for thisparticular project because of my familiarity with the program. To do this I used Vectric Aspire to create a toolpath of my inverted 3-D form I imported from Rhino as a stl. file type for the Techo-Isel LC Series 4896 CNC router to read. After cutting out my mold on the router I create fill the mold with plaster to get the actual shape we want our finished piece. Which is then set to dry before going in the kiln to fully harden. Once the plaster mold was hardened I applied kiln wash to the surface of the mold, in doing this my mold began to crumble because of issues with the integrity of the plaster mixture. Luckily these issues were not so extreme that the mold was unusable. So I did my best to patch the mold before putting my glass piece on it to be slumped.
In the kiln my glass piece didn’t make contact with one of the sides and ultimately failed. However, I learned a lot about the processes involved in making files to be cut on the CNC router,as well as learning a lot about glass as a material and the unpredictability of it. While taking photos of this project for the site I actually shattered it so please enjoy this piece as these are the all that remains of it