mold printing help

[marinesniper]

i was wondering if anyone here has modeled there own 3d printed mold for any of the armor? i saw online that a guy has armor and it has the files for printing 3d molds. i want to do this for my master chief tech suit. my question has anyone done this and did it work out or was it a pain and not worth it?

 

[Cadet]

I can see how theoretically you could print a negative mold for casting, either Resin or rubber in the case of Undersuit or Tech suit parts, but I'm not sure how successful it would be. For one thing, I think it would very difficult to smooth and clean up the printed molds for use. It can already be a pain to finish 3d printed parts, now imagine trying to do that inside out and backwards. Also, most molds end up being done in Silicone (With an exterior shell to hold them then place during the casting process) because not much sticks to silicone, making demolding easier, and the silicone is flexible, allowing, again, for easy demolding of the piece in question.

I think the better idea is to go the traditional route of print the piece, clean it up, then use that as the master and make a silicone mold of the cleaned up piece, and cast it from there in your desired material.

 

[marinesniper]

I can see how theoretically you could print a negative mold for casting, either Resin or rubber in the case of Undersuit or Tech suit parts, but I'm not sure how successful it would be. For one thing, I think it would very difficult to smooth and clean up the printed molds for use. It can already be a pain to finish 3d printed parts, now imagine trying to do that inside out and backwards. Also, most molds end up being done in Silicone (With an exterior shell to hold them then place during the casting process) because not much sticks to silicone, making demolding easier, and the silicone is flexible, allowing, again, for easy demolding of the piece in question.

I think the better idea is to go the traditional route of print the piece, clean it up, then use that as the master and make a silicone mold of the cleaned up piece, and cast it from there in your desired material.

Yeah that's what I have always done in the past but I saw a you tube video where the guy did it and came out good but I just wondered if anyone on here had done it. Thanks for the fast response

 

[Cadet]

I suppose if you resin printed the negative mold, so their were no print lines, and cast the piece themselves in silicone or possibly rubber so they could be removed easily from the mold, then this method could work. That way you wouldn't need a mold shell, and any parts for the Techsuit would be best cast in silicone or rubber anyway. However, if you don't have a resin printer, then the with the work involved in trying to clean up any print lines so your casts were clean just would not really be worth it to me.

 

[PlanetAlexander]

As Cadet said, 3D printing a mold with an FDM printer would be quite hard to clean up, and I think something to keep in mind with resin printing one is to make sure the resin is completely cured, or it might mess with the casting materials. I've printed a mold before - just for some small silicone spikes to use on my hunter hand puppet. The spikes had layer lines, because of how hard it would've been to smooth the mold (they aren't too noticable though). I made sure when modelling the mold to also include tubes for air to flow out from the bottom.

Something I've done a number of times though is to print mold walls for simple one part dump molds. It takes a bit of time to print of course, but I find in the end it saves time having to cut out and glue other material to make walls. I know Volpin Props also prints mold shells for his more complex molds.

 

[TurboCharizard]

i was wondering if anyone here has modeled there own 3d printed mold for any of the armor? i saw online that a guy has armor and it has the files for printing 3d molds. i want to do this for my master chief tech suit. my question has anyone done this and did it work out or was it a pain and not worth it?

I've done matrix moulds supports and mould walls as a print to help reduce silicone usage to some success, printing a whole mould though is a little bit more tricky depending on what you're casting like PlanetAlexander mentions. Foam clay press moulds are pretty much the furthest I've experimented in terms of putting the material right into a print to produce a final piece. It was by no means a perfect process and required plenty of clean up of the part afterwards but for a simple flexible part there's probably some easier ways to go about it.