Vector portrait created by Ruxandradraws on Fiverr from a photograph taken at our wedding.
Finished coin layout, I had to thicken some of the lines to get a deep enough engraving.
CAM layout in Fusion 360.
It took two attempts to get a good engraving, the extruded plexi I was using is not the ideal material but it was what I had on hand. The engraving was a little fuzzy and required quite a bit of manual clean up.
I cut the coin out with a band saw and cleaned up the edges on a belt sander. Next time I will adjust the angle of the sanding table a couple of degrees to add a slight draft. The last step was drilling lots of tiny holes for the air to escape fro
This is a little dental vacuum former I have at work, it was the perfect size for this project.
For the mold material I used 3mm dental grade vinyl. It is the material that mouth guards are made from and you can get a pack of 25 for around $30 on Amazon. Here you can see the buck and the finished mold, I made a total of 5 pulls to speed up t
After trying traditional methods of chocolate tempering, and failing repeatedly I turned to science and technology. Serious Eats has a chocolate tempering method using a sous vide circulator. Step one is vacuum sealing the chocolate.
The sous vide bath is used to precisely raise and lower the temperature of the chocolate to promote correct crystalline growth, tempering the chocolate. Improperly tempered chocolate is soft and melts in your hands making a mess.
The tempered chocolate was poured into the vacuum formed molds.
The result, a few small bubbles but overall a success.
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