Hi guys, just thought I'd share this with you lot - I am trying to make a rather large (230x140x55mm) part on my mill, and making prototypes out of aluminium was getting rather expensive in terms of metal and tooling, so I decided to have a go at making and mahcining some machinable wax.
I got the idea from this amazing thread: BMW V8 dry sump from billet
and duely bought some candles, plastic bags and a cheapo deep-fat-fryer to melt them all in. I then cast some 'billets' in silicone cake-moulds which are great as you can simply peel the moulds off once the wax has cooled.
I started off by cutting my very rough block to size in my bandsaw. It cuts very quickly and cleanly in the saw, but as you can seem my block is full of impurities!
I popped it into my vice with the softjaws I need for a block of this size, and gently clamped it in place. Unlike metal, there doesn't seem to be an obvious point where it feels clamped - I guess it just starts to squish...
I'd been too lazy to mill any of the faces flat, so I indicated the y-zero off the inside of the vice jaws using my 3D-taster. This is a great bit of kit!
I started off milling it with the same parameters as I was planning to use on aluminium -12mm 3-flute rougher 1mm DOC, 5mm WOC and 540mm/min and ~1600 rpm. This was way, way too gentle for the wax, which is practically effortless to cut. So I redid the toolpaths with 2mm DOC, 8.4mm WOC and 1000mm/min feed.
Here's a pic of one end after roughing. Looks like there's something wrong with the toolpath as that post in the foreground shouldn't be there.
The roughing produced a shed load of chips - and the best thing about that is that I can simply pop them in the fryer and melt them back down I could really do with a furnace for my ally chips, but the idea a bucket of molten ally scares the hell out of me!
After roughing, I cracked on with the finishing pass using a 10mm ball-nose mill. I used a 0.5mm stepover and you can see the scallops in the finish in the wax. I should probably have run a full waterline pass over it to clean it up, but my mill-computer locked up mid way
There also seems to be quite a lot of bubbles and other gunk in my wax block - I did try pushing a previously cast block into the pour as it was setting - looks like it bonded ok, but wasn't nearly hot enough to mix properly. I also think I'm going to buy some proper candle making dye to give the block a much darker and hopefully uniform colour.