Best filament to use for lost wax type casting

[Notewell @nigelberry]

Has anyone experience of making a print which is used as a pattern in the aluminium casting process. The one where the print is burned out of the shell into which the molten metal is poured. Is there a better filament to use than PLA?

[Chris White @chrisyt]

@nigelberry Check out MoldLay, I believe it’s a modified PLA with good clean burn-out properties - our sales guy has printed a lot of it on Robox with near perfect prints, the thing I don’t know about is the casting side of it, but they certainly suggest it’s an improvement over PLA. We’re also looking at Polymaker PolyCast as an option (this is PVB based, similar to PolySmooth, so it can be vapour smoothed with alcohol), but I don’t think it’s on general sale yet.

• http://shop.3dfilaprint.com/moldlay-3d-printerfilament-by-kai-parthy-cc-products-1097-p.asp
• http://www.polymaker.com/home/polycast-info/

[Jack @jack-strong My Robox is a Green Kickstarter Limited Edition]

@nigelberry - Do you have experience in casting lost wax method ?

 

[Notewell @nigelberry]

No I have a friend who does excellant foundry work and we are trying to use our combined skills usefully

[Henry @henry My Robox is a Blue Commercial Version Washington State USA]

I have a friend who does brass casting. We are trying MoldLay to see how it works. It looks like it will do the job. ABS does not work but i think most PLA will. It needs to burn out of the mold clean prior to pouring in the metal. I do have some MoldLay i am planning on trying soon.

Poly smooth and Poly Cast look to be close. The big advantage is that they can be smoothed.

[Author]

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