keybai - Keyboard & Casting Projects

[keybai]

"keybai - Keyboard & Casting Projects" is my place to give back to the community by posting info on my DIY projects related to mechanical keyboards, and keycaps and resin casting.




Topic Index:

• Base Plate for Mold Making - Design
• Base Plate for Mold Making - Finished Product
• Cutting Corners on :~$ynth Molds
• Legos for Mold Boxes
• Sculpting Evolution
• Thoughts About Process - 1

[keybai]

My tiny collection of scrounged-up Lego bricks for making mold boxes has served me well, but it's just barely enough to do 4 cavity molds.  As I'm trying to up my production capabilities, I needed new bricks, so I started looking around for a good deal on some Lego blocks.  Used blocks though, hold their value well!  Local classifieds only turned up large sets with more brick types than my very basic needs for mold boxes.  So I decided to bight the bullet, and check out the nearest Lego Store.


Serviceable But Small

The Pick-A-Brick Wall is a great way to score clean bricks for a pretty good price.  They give you a cup, and you can cram it full of Legos from a wall covered in bins of bricks, and they charge you a flat rate.  In my case, $20 CAD.


Cup o' Plastic

I calculated I would need 60 quantity, 2x4 lug bricks to make a 6 cavity mold.  Then I got to wondering if the cup would fit 60, so naturally I asked Google.  I found a post on a Lego forum that showed how to actually maximize the volume, and get 142 in there.  Enough to make 2, 6 cavity molds at a time.


image credit: theJudeAbides - FBTB(dot)net

So with a new larger base plate purchased as well, I hooked up a super nice, modular mold box kit for about $30 CAD!


Ready to make new molds!

[keybai]

When making molds for resin casting artisan keycaps, I first read that you should lay your master on a flat surface on the bottom of your mold box, then add a little bit of clay or something to make a "registration key."  A registration key is an element built into a multi-part mold to make sure the different parts of the mold line up perfectly when casting.  For those familiar with the :~$ynth tool, the 4 legs in the corners are there to make registration keys in your mold. 

For my multiple cavity molds, at first I was using little clay cones placed around my master before pouring the silicone for the first part of the mold, but I found securing them problematic, and I could never quite get them to work just right.  So I've been trying to cut grooves and channels into the first part of my mold after it's hardened.  Then the silicone fills the grooves and channels when I make the second part of the mold, and the 2 parts pretty well.  This has worked for me mostly, but I've run into 2 issues: occasionally I will cut too deep and my mold parts will partially fuse and be ruined, and I can never quite eliminate 100% of the slop in the 2 parts fitting together which causes off center, of otherwise misaligned butts on my caps every so often, so I have to scrap them.

I use Legos for mold boxes, so I've been using scraps of 1/8" polycarbonate from work to act like a smooth plate to line the bottom of my mold boxes.  And I've seen other makers use clay squares under their caps when making the first part of their molds presumably for registration keys.  So I got the idea of trying to combine the smooth plate, and the flat squares into a single, reusable plate for making molds.

I took some measurements tonight, and designed this little thing in Sketchup:



Tomorrow I'm going try and make a prototype in HDPE and see how it works.  You know I'll report back!

[dodgeyhack]

http://bricklink.com/ is also a good way to get specific Lego parts.

[keybai]

http://bricklink.com/ is also a good way to get specific Lego parts.

@dodgeyhack - Good call.  I have used Bricklink to buy Legos in the past and also highly recommend.  I actually bought the black Legos pictured above from a couple Bricklink sellers, originally for enclosures for a little electronics project I worked on.

So I used my lunch break today to make the plates I designed with the table saw at work.  I used scraps of 1/4'' HDPE.  I deally I would have liked to have milled these, and if I had access to a mill, I certainly would have.    But I'm just experimenting so I used what I have easy access to.


]The table saw's blade is for wood, so they are not perfect, but for my intended use, I think they will work just fine.

They turned out pretty much exactly as I suspected.  When I got home tonight, I test fit them in the Lego boxes, and they fit like a dream.


Snug, but not tight.  Rockey Mountain Cap master for scale.

All in all, I am quite pleased.  The next steps will be to continue to refine the sculpt I am currently working on, get masters cast, and then I will be using this rig to make the production molds which will allow me to make artisan keycaps on a much broader scale.  So there's a few things that have to happen before I come back to these, but I absolutely will be following up on these plates and mold boxes.

I'm not sure what's next, but I will try and post more info about my make process very soon.  Thanks for checking out my project!

[keybai]

When I first got my v1 :~$ynth last year, I had a few issues learning how to use it, and making the tool work for me and my process.  I will say that the v2:~$ynth, while very similar, is a much improved tool.  There is one trick I have from v1, that I still use on v2 though.  It's totally possible that everyone with a :~$ynth does this.  There could be a video, or a post here on Geekhack which explains all of this, and I just somehow missed the bus.  I had to figure this out on my own, and it was super helpful for me, so I'm going to share it here.  I modify every :~$ynth mold I make by cutting the corners out of the registration keys.

When my :~$ynth molds come out of their Lego mold boxes, they look like this:



Sliding the :~$ynth and master out of the mold is pretty straight forward.  But the :~$ynth's legs create a vacuum in the registration keys in the mold which makes it slightly more tricky to take the :~$ynth in and out of the mold.  The registration keys in the corners almost act like little, sealed syringes:



A cool thing about the design of the :~$ynth is that the 4 legs are designed in such a way that only the inside 2 faces of each registration key on the mold are really required to get the mold and :~$ynth perfectly lined up.  That allows me to cut out the outside 2 faces of each registration key on the mold, and so eliminate the issue above.  So with a couple quick snips with a pair of fine scissors I end up with this:



The :~$ynth still lines up in the mold perfectly, and it makes (at least my process) of casting and de-molding easier.  This is what they look like put back together:



Anyway, I hope that this might be of help to anyone using a :~$ynth.  If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask here, and I will do what I can to share my knowledge.

[keybai]

The most popular sculpt in my last sale were the Rockey Mountain Crater Caps in SA Godspeed colors.  MiTo reached out and encouraged me to progress the design to work with the forthcoming XDA Godspeed sets, and it's been a huge motivator for me to improve my design and production process.  I'm glad to share some of the important things I've learned. 

I've taken to a sculpting process which includes cycles of sculpting, casting, and re-sculpting.  The image below shows the evolution of the sculpt I have been working on.  Progress is from left to right.


Evolution

• My first step was to create the basic shape of the lunar surface in clay on my :~$ynth.
• Next I made a mold, and cast it in resin.
• I carved in craters, sanded rough edges, made another mold, and recast it in resin.
• This time, shaped the sculpt (using fine sandpaper and calipers) to fit in correctly with the XDA profile, refined the craters, and shaped the surface.  Mostly happy, I made a mold to create production mold masters.
• Caps made in this last mold, get a final round of refinement, and are then used to make my multi-cavity molds for production.

One final thought:  The colors I use for my resin casts while sculpting are either random (to make the resin opaque), pigment mixing tests, or chosen for good contrast to make details easier to see while sculpting.

[keybai]

I got approached on Slack about my process today, talked bout it quite a bit, and thought I would share a few thoughts here as well.  If you're thinking about getting started making artisan keycaps, or are just starting out, and/or getting frustrated, this is for you.

I don't think there are any grand secrets to the basics of making resin keycaps.  If you poke around here, and do some Googling, you can get a good idea of how to get started.  What I don't see very often is the fact that learning to cast resin (at least for me) has been an endless journey of trial and error.  No step by step guide, or write up, or awesome set of photos fully prepared me for all the other little things I could only learn on my own.

The best advice I can give (and do give frequently) is don't give up.  Learn from every success, and every failure.  Even go so far as to document your experiments so you can repeat a process if it works great, or so that you can look back and see what you want to tweak on your next cast.  But don't get too frustrated with failures; they will happen.  When they do, try and diagnose what went wrong, learn, and try again.  But just keep trying.

In manufacturing they say "Fail forward fast."  If you're not failing, you're not pushing your threshold of knowledge.  A fail is a win because you get to actually learn something.  Learn it, apply what you just learned ASAP, and see what happens next.

The amount of things that you just have to figure out on your own surprised me quite a bit.  Whenever I see another artisan post a picture of their process, or mention something about it, I'm always fascinated by how they have approached an aspect of the process, and how it differs from my approach, and the approach of other artisans. 

That's what makes an artisan an artisan IMHO; the time and effort put in to develop a process to realize a vision.

So all that to say, if you're trying to get started, be prepared to hang in there.  Learn from every cast, and research your failures.  Your success will very likely be proportional to your effort!

[Rodde]

Thanks for sharing! Love the use of LEGO for the mold base plates. What made you think of using LEGO in the first place?

[keybai]

Thanks for sharing! Love the use of LEGO for the mold base plates. What made you think of using LEGO in the first place?

Honestly, when I first started looking into resin casting, I saw a few different people reccomend Lego for mold boxes.  I didn't have any for my first attempts, but RocketGruntJake mentioned on r/mk that I should use them to minimize my silicone usage.  Plus the :~$ynth fits a 5x5 stud Lego box perfectly.  Got me some Legos and never looked back!