Ph.D. Candidate in Civil Engineering Halim K. Bas found an innovative use for the new ShopBot Desktop CNC Router in the MakerSpace, making casting molds. The CNC router is a 3-axis machine that can cut a variety of wood and plastic materials in 3D. These molds were cut from sheets of thick acrylic plastic. The molds are used for casting cementitious materials, specifically cementitious syntactic foams. The cubical samples that are cast in these molds, are mainly for compressive testing of the materials. The mold dimensions are not standard, so they needed to be custom made in the MakerSpace.
