Thingiverse
Ecstasy by Eric Gill - Mold for Low Melt Metal in ABS Casting by A_Great_Future_in_Plastics
by Thingiverse
Last crawled date: 4 years, 5 months ago
This is a basic mold for casting Eric Gill's statue Ecstasy
in low melting point metals like Rose's Metal (208F), Field's Metal (144F), etc.
Make sure to use a metal that won't exceed ABS tolerances. I recommend
high quality natural ABS with no dyes/colorants. You can soak off the ABS
using hardware store grade Acetone. Give the metal plenty of time to cool
as it can take hours to reach room temperature.
I recommend printing the mold with lots of perimeters, 30% infill and print slowly
with no cooling fan for best interlayer bonding to minimize cracking as much as
possible. You may wish to try printing this vertically for best preservation of details.
If so, make sure you know how to get good bridging results out of your printer.
May wish to print vertically and upside down so that any poor bridging is hidden
in the base of the statue.
Have fun and keep it safe and sane. Hot metal can cause severe burns VERY
quickly and solvents are flammable and potentially poisonous and need to be
handled appropriately. Do your homework first.
UPDATE (3/29/2016) - Printing this mold vertically, with the heads closest
to the build plate, does work and looks like it produces a more detailed mold.
This can be done without support, but you will either want to manually
administer the print when it gets near the top or alter the G code to alter your speed,
temperature and even fan settings to get it to bridge the top in this orientation.
Print the rest slow, hot and without fan and then alter the settings to get the
bridge established and then back it off once you have a layer to build upon.
My bridge was quite messy (required some cleanup afterwards with xacto) and
spanning that initial 5 cm gap would have been impossible had I not altered the settings.
in low melting point metals like Rose's Metal (208F), Field's Metal (144F), etc.
Make sure to use a metal that won't exceed ABS tolerances. I recommend
high quality natural ABS with no dyes/colorants. You can soak off the ABS
using hardware store grade Acetone. Give the metal plenty of time to cool
as it can take hours to reach room temperature.
I recommend printing the mold with lots of perimeters, 30% infill and print slowly
with no cooling fan for best interlayer bonding to minimize cracking as much as
possible. You may wish to try printing this vertically for best preservation of details.
If so, make sure you know how to get good bridging results out of your printer.
May wish to print vertically and upside down so that any poor bridging is hidden
in the base of the statue.
Have fun and keep it safe and sane. Hot metal can cause severe burns VERY
quickly and solvents are flammable and potentially poisonous and need to be
handled appropriately. Do your homework first.
UPDATE (3/29/2016) - Printing this mold vertically, with the heads closest
to the build plate, does work and looks like it produces a more detailed mold.
This can be done without support, but you will either want to manually
administer the print when it gets near the top or alter the G code to alter your speed,
temperature and even fan settings to get it to bridge the top in this orientation.
Print the rest slow, hot and without fan and then alter the settings to get the
bridge established and then back it off once you have a layer to build upon.
My bridge was quite messy (required some cleanup afterwards with xacto) and
spanning that initial 5 cm gap would have been impossible had I not altered the settings.