This time I got the bright idea of making a solid plastic bottom mold
thingy for one of my one step cut/emboss pancake dies. This one’s
the feather that I posted pictures of on the B.D. Hydraulic forum a
few months back. It’s nearly 6" long by 2" wide with a sculpted
embossing applique piece of 14g… copper, and a 14 hf.rd.wire stem all
soldered to the face of the pancake die. I had been using it with 2
pads of 1/4" hard urethane, but needed a stiffer material to form it
into.
So I got a piece of mystery plastic (Junkyard Rule # 1 : use what you
have in your junkpile) 3/4" thick and big enough for the die to sit on
and be located by pins set into the plastic block. Then the goal is to
create a depression in the block that the part will get pressed into
as it gets pressure added after it gets blanked out. Sure , I could
have cast a mold in plastic steel, or had someone do 3D milling but
this is the junkyard!!. So I roughed out the depression a little with
burrs in the flexshaft, and then took a formed feather and laid it on
there and heated it up so as to melt the plastic into shape. This can
be a slow process, melting a little, pushing the form dowm in tiny
increments and displacing some molten plastic, scraping it off to the
side,cooling , more burring, more melting more scraping. The funny
part was that I was out of acetylene when I started, and was using the
very last gasps of a small B tank that I had been able to get my
welding torch adapted to. So, by the time I barely finished, the torch
had this microscopic little mini flame you could maybe solder a jump
ring with, and was trying to keep this big area hot. Well, it
wouldn’t be Junkyard Wars if they didn’t finish at the last second
against all odds, so that’s what I did. And of course it works great.
A distinct version of the pancake/waffle concept, having the pancake
die whose added embossing component frorms directly into another solid
mold/form/die . I’ll have some shots up on the BD forum soon, and the
ones of the first pancake/waffle die should be up in a few days. I’ll
let ya know.
Aunt Jemimah/Uncle Dar