Molds last between 150-500 shots depending on all sorts of factors in my experience. Once you have the design dialed printing a copy of the mold is not terribly

Molds last between 150-500 shots depending on all sorts of factors in my experience. Once you have the design dialed printing a copy of the mold is not terribly expensive, however, takes several hours and perhaps $5-10 of resin. Buster beagle sells an aluminum casing to surround the mold that greatly increases the life of it since the vast majority of the beating it takes is from pressure from the clamps. Not sure if you are talking about the PTFE molding process or not but this is just straight single shot injection molding, though it is possible to design multi shot processes with this setup. It’s just more complicated. I used polypropylene which imo everyone should start with first because it’s by far the easiest to work with and pretty easily sourced off of eBay. It’s suitable for a wide variety of components for indoor use. For outdoor use you would want something like polycarbonate. I think working with polycarbonate would not be as lucrative in a home machine and here’s why: temp and pressures for polycarbonate are often a bit harder to achieve and the temps you need for molding polycarbonate are often at the upper limits of what these resins used to make the resin molds will tolerate. I think it’s possible though, but requires careful selection of a particular polycarbonate with the correct thermoplastic properties (such as lower melt temp) to operate within the acceptable ranges of your setup.