Manufactured Mold: Thermoform

We made our first mold in lab today, using the CNC lathe, mill, drill press, arbor press, and reamer!

The thermoform part only involves one mold, shown below:

The top of our thermoform piece mold, with the dome structure that will form our clear plastic yoyo cover.

The bottom of our thermoform piece mold, with the pin holes at the north and south axes.
The vacuum holes are visible right next to the inner ledge.

We used the lathe to turn the dome shape and ledges, while we used the mill, drill press, and reamer to create the two pin holes. Another drill press was used to create eight tiny vacuum holes, while an arbor press pushed the pins into the mold.

A tiny drill was used to create the vacuum holes.

The arbor press right before we pushed the pins down into the mold.

We also scheduled time to do a couple of test runs -- we made five test covers in all:

The top face of our very first thermoformed part.

The bottom face of the yoyo cover.

As expected, our first run didn't result in perfect yoyo covers off the bat. The texture was speckled (dust!!!), and there was some webbing near the pins.

Thus, for the subsequent runs, we pushed the pins down more to decrease webbing, cleaned the mold and plastic extra well to decrease chances of catching dust, and altered some parameters such as heating time.

Next week, we plan to manufacture the rest of our yoyo part molds, and start injection molding!