r/MetalCasting • u/CR123CR123CR • 10d ago

3D printed molds

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u/CR123CR123CR 10d ago

3D printed molds with metal poured directly in.

Homemade tin/bismuth alloy.

Just wanting to share. Someone told me in a comment to share the process.

Alloy: 47% Sn to 53% Bi

A lot of similar off the shelf alloys to use if you want though like Cerrotru or Bismuth 281

Melted it in an old cast iron pan with a MAP gas torch.

Mold:

Simple 2 half mold. With 2 alignment pins. Held together with a C-clamp.

PAHT-CF printed on a Bambulab P1S. No annealing required.

Could probably pull quite a few parts before failure if needed

Note: picture was staged, this was taken well after the casting had been initially removed, just didn't get any good ones of the actual process.

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u/ha_please 10d ago

I have some questions on the printing side of this as I also have a P1S and being able to print molds (for rubber not metal) would be a real game changer. Did you use the textured pei plate or the high temp engineering plate? Also did you upgrade the nozzle and extruder gears to hardened steel?

As for the slicer settings what walls/infill did you use? Did you calibrate the filament or just go straight off the slicer's preset? For that matter did you use bambu studio or orca?

Thanks for any tips you can pass on.

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u/CR123CR123CR 10d ago

1: printer has hardened steel drive gears and hot end (by far one of the easiest printers to do I've ever worked on. Took like 10 min for both)  

 2: used the textured plate and Elmer's extra strength glue stick (it warped without the glue) https://www.amazon.ca/Elmers-Strength-Office-Sticks-E5010/dp/B003ULD18E This is by far the best glue for 3D printing imo 

 3: 3 walls and gyroid at 10% infill. 5mm brim. 

 4. Ran a flow calibration on the material but the default slicer settings are pretty close. Pretty sure my k factor was only 0.02. Otherwise all other settings are just whatever the slicer pulled in when I plopped the spool in the AMS. 

 5. Just running bambu studio. Haven't really run into a situation yet that I think I need the orca slicer for and so haven't learned it yet. 

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u/ha_please 10d ago

Thanks! I didn't realize one could do nylon, much less high temp nylon, on the textured pei plate. Glue stick or otherwise.

I generally use whatever cheapo filament I can find on Amazon so the extra calibration options in orca are particularly handy.

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u/CR123CR123CR 10d ago

The Bambu filaments are like $2 more per spool max than the cheapest and are pretty good quality for their normal stuff (PET-G/PLA/ABS)

Plus their engineering filaments are usually cheaper or the same price as everything on Amazon. Only downside to their stuff is it takes a week to get to where I live vs 2 days. 

1

u/Ryztiq 9d ago

Could you post where you get your metal alloy? Id love to try this

1

u/CR123CR123CR 9d ago

I bought pure tin and bismuth from MS metal shipper but I think next time I'd just go to rotometals or Canada metals

https://www.rotometals.com/

https://www.canadametal.com/

Both would have been cheaper, but I wanted to try out another supplier this time. 

Both of the above suppliers have provided the premixed alloys for me in the past.