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RE: Optimize a design for 3d printing
This is great @drmake ! Btw have you done any work with casting metal into 3D printed molds?
This is great @drmake ! Btw have you done any work with casting metal into 3D printed molds?
If you want to do metal casting you have to do sandcasting or possibly, investments casting. In that case you would need to make a positive of what you where going to mold and the use that as a master for sandcasting. you can do burnout of pla or you can use special filament which do ash free burnout. Even for very low temperature metals like pewter, a typical fdm printed mold would warp. Maybe it would be possible with some of the resinprinters using high temperaturetolerance resin. Using sandcasting would be a much more realistic solution at this point. I have written a few posts about that if you are interested. you might also be interested in @fathin-shihab . She does chocolate molds in silicone. alot of the designs decision are similar.
oops obviously didnt read @drmake s reply since I wrote exactly the same link to the chocolate things :-)
Some good info @evilhippie anyways (and thanks also to @drmake for his reply). I'll give you and @fathin-shihab a follow. I'm kind of interested in sandcasting as I had some possible projects for it and plenty of Al lying around (like heat sinks) but not enough time of to do anything about it :(
No, not yet...casting metal is generally not so easy as most metal alloys are too hot for normal FDM printed molds. They would just burn the mold.
What works quite well with 3d printed molds are silicons I did this for the fingertips of my Inmoov Robot.
And @fathin-shihab has also some nice posts in their blog how to make chocolates out of 3d printed molds.