Weng Launch Party!

We took our electric car (in parts) in to get powder coated yesterday! Now we're just finishing up some headlights and controller mounts, and getting set to present the car on June 1st. Then next Friday we're having a launch party! If you're in the area, you should stop by the d.school at Stanford and check it out!

building the electric car

Here is a cool time-lapse of us making a unistrut prototype for our electric car: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreasmb/4560083742/ .

Weng Motors Website

check out wengmotors.com for up-to-date reports on our progress building the electric vehicle...

Weng Motors

New thesis direction - five of us have joined forces to build a concept electric car. Sort of a cross between a Vespa and a pickup. Here's my most recent prototype, with some fancy suspension on both front and back wheels.

a necklace

This is last of my project for the silversmithing class - a necklace that incorporates the finding (clasp) into the design.

lost wax casting process, part 2

After all the wax is melted out of the flask, it is put in a casting machine that pulls a vacuum through the plaster and helps pull the molten silver out to the edges of the cavities left by the wax.

Here is the same tree, now cast in silver.

It was pretty tricky cutting all the sprues off from the inside of the piece. Luckily the blade of a jeweler's saw can be threaded through holes and then attached to the saw frame.

And this is the final piece all polished up. The project was called the Volume Challenge - the piece had to weigh less than 1 gram in wax and not fit in any of the given boxes. I think this one passed the challenge. It was definitely big enough. The wax weighed 1.6 grams when I cast it, but then I did a lot of filing and sanding to the silver.

lost wax casting process

Here are some snapshots of the long process I went through for one of my silversmithing projects.

First I turned a hunk of machinable wax down into an elipsoid using the radius cutter on a lathe. The photo above shows a piece of acrylic being turned, but the setup was the same for the wax.

Here is the wax after turning and additional drilling using the drill press. The large central hole was used to hold the wax onto the aluminum lathe fixture.

I used an X-acto knife, small carving tools, and the Foredom flexishaft with different sized burrs for carving out the inside.

It broke a couple times, and I melted the tiny pieces back together.

The I sprued the carved wax onto a wax "tree" with a couple of other parts that I carved for a necklace project. The rubber base that you see here fits around a metal cylindrical flask that gets filled with plaster. The plaster hardens, the rubber base is removed, and the flask is placed inside a kiln to burn out the wax, leaving behind pathways for the molten metal to flow into the parts.