3 ms·

I wonder if it might be possible to make moulds out of other materials for hobby-scale things? For example, a mould which is made of plaster/concrete with an i

I wonder if it might be possible to make moulds out of other materials for hobby-scale things? For example, a mould which is made of plaster/concrete with an inner layer of silicone? That would be pretty easy/cheap to manufacture. You'd use a 3d plastic printer ($150), dip the print in casting silicone, then float the result in concrete, with the concrete surface being the parting line. Then use a scalpel to cut the silicone along the parting line and add more concrete to make the other half of your mould.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
The design the buster beagle uses is an aluminum box you drop your molds into after printing them. Though this idea is interesting, I think, for people who are injecting with variable size molds that a single casing would not suffice for. A desktop CNC at that scale to make simple stuff like casing boxes is probably going to be more affordable and less hassle/mess than your suggested setup pretty quick though. Desktop is definitely not going to be good enough to make aluminum molds themselves though. I think you need a 5 axis CNC for that. Surprisingly my makerspace actually has one of those and I considered learning how to use it but decided against it. In practice however on these molding setups I’ve found you are already kind of constrained on your mold sizes a lot simply by virtue of your machine’s volume capacity. The one I have goes up to 3 cubic inches, but in practice you can’t use all of that capacity and you get weird/bad results for too small of capacity too so the actual ranges of shot volume I can produce in a mold are actually constrained to something like 1-2.5 cubic inches