Talk:SLS wax printer

From RepRap
Jump to: navigation, search

This is great work and great documentation. Kudos and Thanks!

I agree, excellent work and totally end-to-end! A taller sprue or centrifugal casting process would give you a little more casting head pressure, which forces metal into the tiny details in the mold. Regarding the wax residue left in the mold, my understanding is that burnout is typically around 1200 deg Fahrenheit, to vaporize the wax residue and chemically bound water, but zinc is pretty forgiving of this. To avoid problems with wax curl and burnout, I wonder if you could directly fluid deposition print the investment casting shell, already containing a fluid-tight hole for the cast metal part? You could either have the print head dribble water onto a box of dry investment (similar to your current setup), or find a thixotropic quick-setting investment and design a print head to mix it with water and extrude. Concrete printing in 3D is a pretty well known technology at the large scale... Olawlor 07:16, 5 March 2012 (UTC)