/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1465223
>Is that sum Mann ease release?
It's the bee's knees. I've done some epoxy projects with printed parts as the mold and just sprayed them with Mann. Just had to cut the mold enough with a band saw to break it off the cured piece.

>>1370530
>and none of the inherent weakness of printing.
The resins you cast into silicone have the same impact rating as PLA. They're also more expensive than you would think. And that's ignoring how expensive silicone gets when you're trying to make larger molds.
The impact rating of a given resin also degrades as soon as you add pigment or don't casting them under constant heat and pressure. I did okay with pressure, but didn't get to the point of having a pressure oven.
>You're looking at like a cost of a dollar in exchange for production time on the scale of minutes instead of hours
Find me a resin with a cure time under 2 hours that has an izod rating above 2. And then I'll have to let you know that the cure times are assuming a given volume for the resin that is one sixth that of the parts I would need to be casting so that number doesn't actually indicate how long my parts would need to cure.

The resin systems I tried stated "1 hour" of cure time, but they use heat to cure and as the volume of the part increases so too does the time it takes for the part to stop producing and losing that heat. My casting schedules ended up closer to 8 hours per mold set in order to prevent part distortion after being freed from the molds. Going shorter than that timeframe would have required a pressure oven.

This isn't territory I haven't already explored. I started with casting and it simply did not work out. Yes, I was able to produce more parts in a weekend through casting than I could through printing. However, I had to invest way more labor in that timeframe to produce those parts. So if printing were to catch up all I had to do was just buy more printers.

>>1294767
>Some resins are on par with conventional thermoplastics
They promise to be, but even the highest impact-rating polyurethanes I've tried have lost a significant percentage of their strength as soon as pigments are added to them. I was using Alumilite Performance 80D can it managed to have properties slightly worse than PLA.

Resin-cast parts are also somewhat labor intensive to produce. And at the pour volumes most of my parts are at the cure times are fairly long (6 to 8 hours @ 40psi).

I produced the first 12 of these with mostly pressure-cast parts and it was a ton of work and much more expensive of an investment than just printing the parts. There's also the issue of being tied down with a certain part revision because you've poured a mold. If you want to revise a part you have to repour the mold. And silicone worth using for this is fairly expensive.