Here’s the take-home point of the Instructable I’m sharing with you here:
…it’s possible to 3d print a mold with existing technologies for limited use.
Nice!
For this experiment, Bryan Brutherford (whose work we have previously shown some Pinterest Love) made a 3D-printed mold of his Brutherford Industries logo. In this case he used a high-res Objet printer to print an acrylic photo-polymer mold. The result looks pretty smooth.
Next Bryan sprayed the mold with some silicone mold release, such as this one, and injected some melted cellulose acetate pellets — who among us doesn’t have some cellulose acetate lying around?
It looks like it took six tries to get the injection just right, and that’s not bad. The final result is a really sweet keychain.
What does this mean for MakerBot owners? According to his Instructable, the mold started to deform after 20 uses or so. We do already know that other low-melting point materials can do pretty well in an ABS mold. This sign on Thingiverse by Tinkerer was cast in pewter.
The printed mold here came from an expensive desktop unit, as Bryan is an industrial designer and indicates he used an Objet. Prints on a MakerBot can be stunningly detailed and fine right off the build platform. And if you’re looking to create even smoother surfaces on your print, there are several easy solutions that we’ll be detailing in an upcoming episode of MakerBot TV.
Does anyone have any experience with injection molding?