How to BUILD A ROTATIONAL CASTING MACHINE ROTO CASTER for plaster and resin molds moulds

1.21 gigawatts! Great Scott! Hey there, this is John Burns with John Burns Fine Art. Today I want to talk about my rotational casting machine, also known as a rotocaster. I will talk about the materials and methods I've employed to create my machine and where I'm at on it. I also would like to mention that the items in the making of this project are going to be listed in the description down below. So I encourage you to look at the description. The links will take you over to Amazon. Also, there's some other goodies in there like my Instagram link if you want to follow me off YouTube and see what I'm doing on Instagram. That link is also down below. If you like this video, hit like and please subscribe for more fun videos like these and select all notifications so you can stay current as I release the videos. That's that. Let's get going. Thanks for coming along guys. Okay guys, this is my rotational casting machine. This is where I'm at so far. I haven't been able to complete it but I'll show you what I've got. One of the things that you want to consider with a rotational casting machine is your smallest dimension here. The smallest dimension is going to dictate the largest mold that you can put in here. So this is actually 13 and three quarters inside. So it's a smaller capacity and this way is 15 and a quarter. So I might be able to go a little bigger if it turns say this way. If it can clear like 16 and a half inches, meaning if I want to not necessarily put it in here but if it's longer hanging out, it can hang out to a maximum of 16 and a half because it can clear the second box that way. But we're definitely limited within 15 inches and the 16 and a half. Yep. So I've got this set up so it actually turns one time in here for every time that way. The way some of these work is some people only get half of a turn here like that for the full turn. This gear here has to be static. This cannot move because this one is forced to walk this gear which does move. So I took a half inch dowel out here. And these by the way are just bike parts. This is a bike chain. I will warn you though one of the problems I ran into with this bike chain is that these teeth were too wide for the gears. I couldn't figure out what in the world was going on. I was thinking that these were just spaced too far apart and that's why it wasn't seating until I realized at one point that I had to file these teeth flatter. So I got a Dremel with the grinding wheel and I ground down each tooth a little thinner so that it could sink into these bike chain teeth. And then of course you just measure it to the length that you need. And if you don't have a chain breaker they do have videos on how to break a chain without a chain breaker. You basically take a drilled hole on something and then put that pin over the drilled hole and you tap it out. And then you'll have to finish from there. So anyway so this rod is a half inch and I don't know if you can see this very well here. I filled the inside of this bike gear with a half inch piece of birch ply. I glued it down and then this half inch rod I hooked up to it. And I probably ran a screw and then also did the JB weld there. So that's on there pretty well. Now on this side of the rod to make sure that it didn't slide in and out I just made my own cotter pin. I took a paneling nail and bent it you know a rainbow shape with a pin, drilled a hole and then pegged it through there. And that's just enough to keep it from going through. Now these parts here these are called bevel gears. You can have 3D printers print them or you can find other devices which use them. If you have an old broken bread machine and feel like you know salvaging you know do that. Or you could get on Amazon like I did and buy replacement parts for your KitchenAid mixer. So these have bevel gears and then what I did was this is square notched inside so I just kind of beat a round peg into a square hole. And then once I saw where it was rubbing, of course since it's square there's long dimensions, I drilled a hole and ran a small pin through it so that it couldn't rotate inside of there. So there is another hole drilled through this inside of this cavity with a pin running through it to keep it from turning. This here is a long bolt. This sits well with just like a quarter inch threaded bolt so this hole is completely hollow. I just took more JB Weld mixed up that putty. It's an epoxy putty and then I put this bolt on it. Well you have to make sure that this is flat and that's perfectly centered straight up. Because if you don't you're going to get a wonky head that as it turns it's going to want to do this kind of elliptical up and weird thing. You want it to be perfectly concentric so that it turns with this. Otherwise you're going to have it skipping and dodging when it needs to be turning. So I drilled this bolt. I drilled through the thread and ran another paneling nail through there and I have plenty of washers to space this to make sure that that's tight. Put a slight hook on it. Put a screw there so that as this turns you can see how as that turns it eventually that screw stops it. Well it's the screw that's actually turning so it catches that screw and that's what turns that box. These holes that I drilled through here I drilled it through with a 5 16th and then I took a regular like you know ballpoint pen like this and I you know emptied it out. I gutted the pen and then I cut it into the length that I needed here. Cut cut now cut cut and then I you can peg those into the wood into that 5 16th hole and then you have a quarter inch hole and then that acts to help these not get hung up. It creates less friction so you don't have the bolt tearing in on the wood. Up here it's kind of the same thing. I drilled a hole through the end of the screw and ran a I bent a pen or a paneling nail like a cotter pin and put that through there and of course the washers there to help stop tearing it up. So I used the equipment that I used was a wind drill press. I'll put that in the description and I also use a wind scroll saw and so these are great items. They're relatively affordable compared to like some of the other ones out there I'll tell you and these have been very reliable so I got the scroll saw for like $117 and the drill press for like $140 or something like that I can't remember but it'll be in the description you'll see the actual price. So then as I come around over here what I did was I measured this. This is like a two inch motor and I just swung a compass and cut that out with the scroll saw and I had measured the distance for the front of this motor because there's little pins. I wasn't quite sure how to rig this up so in here there's two bolts that are attached to the motor that you can see the screws on the back. I attached them to this board that way and then once I had this motor hooked up to this quarter inch birch ply I just glued that down to this and ran some nails to secure it and it's it's been holding fine but then this has a 5 16th bolt and it's it has a hole running through it so I set it up to where I could drill into this frame. I believe that that's an eighth inch there and then I just took a piece of welding rod and I ran that in there and then bent it and stapled it so this is actually going through the the motor's center axis here the bolt. I don't even need to use a a nut there to keep that on there because this welding rod is keeping it pinned on the inside of the frame so this when this powers it it's going to force that bolt to turn and as that turns then I get the action all together. I mean I could sit here and manually rotate this for 20 minutes some of these have a hand crank so that you can take it around like a hurdy-gurdy and that's that way. So with this circuit board I took a bick one of those transparent bick pins and I cut off like three eight sections and then I just used wood screws to mount this to the board so that gives plenty of airflow behind the circuit board don't have to worry about it getting terribly hot it keeps it off of there and I went ahead and hooked this up to the power there is a fuse here that's a 10 amp but I at first see I'm still pioneering this I'm not an electrician I'm an artist and I had just run this straight with just a cord a lamp cord straight from this to the power well as soon as I hook that on just sparks fly so you know be careful be very careful I'm just telling you what I did and I don't want you to do what I did so if you do what I do it's on you and so I ran direct current into this direct current motor don't do that you need an AC an alternate current converter and the way that I understand anyway before I get there so I took an AC adapter and I hooked it up and this converts it as I plug it in but this is not enough power I don't know if this can even be seen here but this says that it is a the output is a seven and a half volt and a two amp well this is a DC 12 volt motor and I think it's a 30 watt so if we do that the way that I understand this and if any electricians watching this video want to comment go ahead and leave it in the description but I the way that I understand this on the AC converter I have a seven and a half volt and I multiply that by the amperage two and a half amps which would give me 15 watt so I'm only getting half the power out of this motor that I should be getting so what I'm honestly looking for I want to get a 12 volt output with a two and a half amp and that should get me to 30 watt 12 times two and a half and that'll get me to the 30 watt and that should power this well and get this hopefully to perform the way it was intended to because right now you can't tell the difference whether it's on the far left or far right setting how that's supposed to behave so right now and this if this gets going too fast the idea is to clamp this down to the tabletop so let's see here yeah so right now if I want to I can put molds in here what I would do is if you know say like I had a smaller mold that I wanted to run through here I would either take a piece of screen maybe something like chicken wire or you know something like that some type of mesh screen or you and then I would staple it you know in key places and then you tie down your mold with either cord or something like that or you could just start off by running staples one two three four five six seven eight wherever you need them and then kind of run either bailing wire or something like that so that you have something to secure your mold to that's how you end up securing the mold inside of one of these is to have some type of brace so like what I wanted to do here with this one was run this bar here to here and again here to here and then that way I could put my molds on here and then just strap them to that and if I need to I could probably put one across here and then that should give me sufficient you know wiggle room to put any mold on this after I do that then I can you know manually turn this and I can guarantee that I'm going to get a really nice even coat you know it's going to turn it and the great thing about a homemade rotocaster is that if you ever push this thing to its limits I mean just too far you you know how you built it you can replace the parts so like these paneling nails if that ends up getting bent out of shape preventing this from turning I can just go get a tempered paneling nail you know that one's not tempered but right now it's working so I'm going to put faith in it and as I just continue to turn this I know that I'm getting a good round and round covering and this is really good with resin molds and this isn't terribly exhausting you know you can put on whatever you want to binge in the background and just stand here and do this while you watch your program or you know whatever you want to do have a conversation with somebody who's sitting there drinking coffee watching you I'm just kidding so this is it this is my rotational casting machine the wood was just scrap wood that I put together you know I recommend running two nails in each board just to keep it from turning you know sideways flipping weird and I have a carry handle on it I tried to set it up because I figured this side would be heavier but it might end up being heavier on that side but I can carry this and set it you know I can slide this in a nice thin spot but when you operate it you obviously need a lot more room you see so the my philosophy in my studio is because it's not as my studio space isn't as big as I want it to be is that everything has to be able to be put away put somewhere you know I guess that's kind of a IKEA philosophy things have a place they can be broken down and folded and stowed until they need to be used so you guys chime in if I could improve this let me know if it encouraged you let me know I appreciate it thanks a lot thanks for coming along thanks for letting me share this with you I appreciate that it means a lot this stuff is not that much fun to do if I can't share it with somebody you know all right take care guys