The cradle for the 1.6 scale Chicago North Western J class Mikado will be investment cast in Silicon Bronze. The print is 1.5 times the price for the casting itself. It is 13.14" wide, 7.86" tall with the casting spurs. And 25.52" long. The locomotive uses an early style Coles trailing truck.
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He who dies with the most unfinished projects: Should of put more time into their hobby.
From an engineering and modeling stand point, that is impressive and super cool. When you created the final model with the risers, did you end up going with different scale factors in the X, Y, and Z directions to account for more/less shrinkage in those direction when cooling?
SPSteam2491 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 19, 2019 2:32 pm
From an engineering and modeling stand point, that is impressive and super cool. When you created the final model with the risers, did you end up going with different scale factors in the X, Y, and Z directions to account for more/less shrinkage in those direction when cooling?
The foundry setup up the shrinkage for the part. They also ran a computer simulation to verify correct metal flow. I had to thicken up some areas of the part.
Tim
He who dies with the most unfinished projects: Should of put more time into their hobby.
Nice! I used metal flow software for castings and it is really cool to see the "metal" flow into the casting but more importantly, it greatly aids in eliminating possible areas of concern when actually pouring the part. I am eagerly watching to see the finished product!
SOLIDCast and FLOWcast were the softwares I used and they have progressed even more since I used it. https://finite.solutions/
SOLIDCast allow you to design risers, gates and gets a good approximation on how the casting will cool to see if your risers and gates are large enough and can provide sufficient material so the part you want to keep doesn't have areas where the material could shrink too far. If I remember correctly, it doesn't model pouring in the metal but just dumps all the metal into the mold at once.
FLOWCast takes it to next level and uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to model pouring in the metal into the mold. CFD is some really complex stuff and it takes a lot more computing power but will help determine if the material will reach every nook and cranny on the mold. Simple designs often skip this step but I would imagine the cradle Tim designed would have went through that software. Watching that software fill a mold is really cool to watch and quite mesmerizing . Here is an example:
Thanks! I'll explore the software. I'm near getting my induction furnace operational, and I don't have any real experience in mold making, so these should be quite useful to me.
H
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