daan wrote: Fri Apr 20, 2018 2:25 am
What I'm curious about is what the sunlight (UV) does to all the printed detail. I presume the building goes inside your garage during winter?
If you have a lot of the same forms to print, it could be an option to print a few, make a mold and pour the rest of them with resin.
Daan,
Only time will tell about the weather effects. Some items ( the earlier ones mostly) were printed with PLA which is supposedly bio-degradable, so I'm expecting problems sooner or later. I then switched to using ABS in the hope that it will be more stable. Everything, apart from the ridge tiles, has several coats of primer, paint and varnish, which will help. The ridge tiles are just plain ABS as they came from the printer, so we'll see. I don't take any of my other buildings in during winter and wasn't planning to with this, but I'll just have to see how it goes.
Your combined printing and casting idea isn't something I'd thought of. However, having had some previous limited experience of resin casting, I'm not sure there would be any real advantage. Once the drawings are done and the print parameters worked out, it's just a matter of printing things one at a time until you have enough. If you saw the pulleys I did for Rik's sawmill, the actual printing of all the bits was less than a day. Similarly with Tom's coupler pockets, to do 8 identical ones took about 4 hours in total, whereas making a mould of the first one and then casting 8 individual items from that, would take at least a couple of days for curing times, plus additional cost for the mould silicone. As for cost, Tom's 8 coupling pockets, printed in ABS, cost about 76pence in total . I'm pretty sure that mould materials and casting resin wouldn't come down anywhere near that.
I guess that going to a commercial scale operation, there could be a break point at which the printed master time and cost becomes less than casting materials bought in bulk, but I suspect that by the time you get there then simply conventional injection moulding would be the way to go.
Interesting 'lateral thinking' idea though, thanks.
