When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Making our money flexible


This morning I got the legs and wire lathe on the mound form. (If Rob from Indiana saw this, he'd want to cover it in concrete :) We waited on casting the coin sheets as they are very flexible when the resin kicks off. This way we could pull them from the mold and bend them over the form. They are very soft at this stage as well, and this allowed us to brad nail them to the ribs on the form.
At this point, the only thing to do was cast a sheet and nail it down. It takes about 12 minutes to mix/pour and demold a finished part. Now due to other things going on, we weren't as fast as that, but we were close.


They have already shot the fountain this will be sitting in, so the front edge doesn't need to be very clean, we just left an overhang so they can crop it where they need. They will be pouring water all over this, and as we overlapped the seams away from camera, this meant that it would shed water like a backwards shingle. So we filled the back seams with a urethane adhesive, both a glue and water resistant.

Then it was a few coats of gloss black for this huge pile.


I will leave this to dry overnight, and in the morning we will spray it with Alsa Chrome. This is as chrome as you can get from a paint. It goes on supper light, and takes the same reflective characteristics as the gloss coat under it. Should look pretty sweet once we individually pick out and paint the gold tone coins. No copper though, to bad, copper is my favourite colour!
8)
JO

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