Hi my name is Vic Joyner. I'm a 30 year bench jeweler and the inventor of the HD Pattern system.  These next series of videos is going to show you how we make molds, we make patterns, and what those patterns are going to look like after they come back from casting.  It's very parallel to the wax injection, lost wax casting process that we're familiar with.  Basically this system picks up where metal mold leaves off.  Many of you are familiar with metal molded patterns.  They produce very consistent weights, accuracy, have incredibly long shelf life, but there are some limitations to metal mold. Metal mold is rigid and has to come apart and that part that is produced from the mold cannot have any undercuts.  Our traditional rubber mold making around a metal master has always allowed us to remove these undercuts, but the pattern system I'm about to explain is in fact a plastic.  It's a photo curing polymer that is going to burn out like wax so it's the best of both worlds.  You'll be able to have the undercuts that you would normally have in traditional rubber mold making, but with the durability, flexibility, long shelf life, and exact weight pattern to pattern that we need to have.

The patterns themselves are very accurate.  They're going to be as accurate without shrinkage as the original master pattern that we started with.  We're going to show you how we're going to make the clear silicone molds that are used to produce the patterns and we're going to show you how those patterns are then made from the silicone mold.  We're going to show you some of the finished pieces.  So let's get started we're going to start first with the mold making and then we're going to advance to the use of the machinery and the larger industrial machines.

These are the various HD products that are used for patterning and for producing those patterns we're going to need for casting, but also patterns that are going to be used as mastered copies.  This is the original high-def pattern material.  It produces a pink pattern, very rigid, long shelf life, but unlike the inventor it's got absolute perfect memory.  There's infinite storage on this material so once the pattern is made it can stay in inventory for as long as you want and the piece is going to have the exact weight each time and every time.  Now this is a small dispensing bottle we also are going to show you how the injector works that this dispensing bottle will go into and then be used in more traditional injection.  Don't let the size of the bottle fool you.  This will actually produce 48 troy ounces of 14-karat gold castings.  This is the Avatar material.  This is the newest of the HD polymers.  It burns in a broader range of sizes.  So if we needed to make something like a class ring, Super Bowl ring, this is for higher volume but it will also work very well in the smaller more intricate shapes such as this earring or this woven bracelet.  Again it's going to produce the same amount of patterns, 48 troy ounces.

Another new product is the mastering compound.  This is also cured in the same system using pressure and lights to produce the patterns, but it's a white, very hard material.  Now this is going to be able to duplicate any pattern that you've already produced a mold of by using that first mold as a master generator.  So if I was building this bracelet from a rapid prototyping model and I would happen to break this in the construction of this mold, I can easily use the white compound to produce more masters if additional models are needed and molds for production.  So for this bracelet I might want to have five or six different molds that I could rotate for speed of production. I will copy the original with the white material, make another mold, and have duplicate molds for making the patterns that will go to casting.

Again I want to talk a little bit about the advantage of using polymer patterns for casting.  Traditional wax injection is very difficult to keep the patterns within a ten percent tolerance range.  It was very acceptable when gold was at lower prices, but at this point with the market, a one tenth of one gram variation in a ring is going to be over four dollars and that makes trying to keep those patterns exactly precise and weight all the more important.  Small parts, small distortion.  We can also work in a size range that is much less than what traditional wax will get to this particular pattern is 0.2 millimeters.  So the rapid prototyping piece for that pattern was produced.   I made a clear silicone mold around it, once the mold was cut, the Avatar material was poured in, and once cured under pressure and light it was sent to casting, and here we have a continuum silver leaf that is actually 0.2 millimeters.  When we talk about tolerance reduction, it's very important to realize that in the traditional lost wax casting process, starting from an original that was perhaps milled in wax then cast then finished as a silver master, then going to traditional press molding, vulcanized rubber molding in a press, then to the wax injection, then to the casting, and then to the cleanup, there are six separate levels of shrinkage that we incur.  The first when the wax is cast to create the first rough casting that's going to be finished to a master.  The second is when we take that master and then clean it up to high polish.  That's the second reduction.  The third reduction is when we go into traditional press what I call press molding, that might be VLT or traditional vulcanized rubber.  That depending on how you pack the mold frame and the heat and pressure that you use for curing it, you may have a fluctuation of the cavity that may vary as much as five percent, seven percent, three percent, the actual cavity of the mold material is going to shrink smaller than what the original was.  So that's our third level of shrinkage.  And then we shoot wax into that traditional mold and in that process of shooting the wax in we're going to get maybe three to seven percent shrinkage of the wax.  Then that's going to be our fourth.  Then we're going to go in to cast that wax.  That's going to be our fifth.  And then when we finish that final casting to the finished product that's the sixth level of reduction.  Our tolerances are so tight now that most of us are generating master patterns via CAD/CAM that they cannot take that level of shrinkage and so we sometimes have to go back and recalibrate.

So the advantage of using this system is we're going to stay one to one.  I've designed this particular earring for 2.2 millimeter stones, it's 2.2 millimeter stones in the CAD/CAM model, it's 2.2 millimeter stone stones in the poured clear silicone because the clear silicone is no shrink, it's not vulcanized, it's mixed and poured as you'll see in the videos. The pattern that came out of that mold after curing the stone size is still remaining 2.2 and oddly enough there's a slight amount of expansion with this material that ends up that our final casting is also 2.2.  So we have to make no adjustments at all, our original CAD model and our final casting you're going to be one in the same.