home Projects 3D graphics jewelry home
links about me contact me

Torus Knot out of plaster

We had to make a knot out of plaster. the knot didn't need to be anything special. So the first one I could think of was the torusknot function in 3DsMax.

torusknot rendering toruskot rendering

Well since you can't mill this shape directly with my machine, I had to decompose it into simpler pieces that would also fit into the work area of my machine.

3D piece to mill

path generated.

The prepared pieces serve to generate a tooling path for the mill with is shown above, done in egdecam, the easiest program to do this, I find. Below is the verification of the tooling path.

mill preview

freshley milled piece

this is what my machine milled. It wasn't set on very precise, because it is so slow, so the whole operation took 7 hours, just to mill, and another 7-8 hours or so until I had all the parameters and everything figured out, I'm just beginning. Then I cut out the pieces and pasted them together and finished it to make the negative mould below. So I just needed to pour in the plaster , make 4 identical pieces and paste them together.

positive wooden mould bottom positive milled mould top

negative plastic mould

plaster torus knot

And here is the final product, not bad hey.