Greetings All, I'm curious if anyone has come up with any sort of formula for the weight of PLA to the amount of metal (Aluminum) to melt/pour into a mold? I realize infill greatly changes things, but I've done lost wax casting, and there was a X wax = Y Metal (specific to silver) Thoughts, and Thanks
chances are if your talking a pla part, then it was cad modeled. From the cad model (in most programs) they give you the volume of the part which can be converted into the weight of aluminum.
They aren't cad, but STL's downloaded, from thingiverse. My first PLA project, is a chess board, one side in Aluminum, and the other in copper.
A quick internet search shows that PLA is between 1.2 and 1.4 grams/cm cubed, and 356 aluminum is 2.67 grams/cm cubed, so aluminum is about twice as dense as PLA (check me on that, I just grabbed some info off the net). But don't forget that 3D printed patterns are often not solid PLA, but rather you can vary the density of the structure to save plastic, so just weighing a printed part does not necessarily give a good comparison. Hope this helps. I was wondering this just the other day. .
Maybe it would be safe to say that with 25% infill, then the part would weigh 1/4 of what the solid PLA part would weigh? You could print a little 1" cube both solid and with 25% infill, and weigh them both.
most slicers or programs that allow you to view an stl will tell you the parts volume so you can calculate out the weight.
Do yourself a BIG favor and do not pour straight copper. As a casting material it SUCKS and it's not really a beginner metal. Buy some quality sil-bronze. Here is a link for ya. https://www.budgetcastingsupply.com/category-s/1855.htm Sil-bronze is a sweetheart metal to cast, it's easy and trouble free. You can polish the stuff and it looks like gold too! If you have an industrial metal supply company near you, they sell it in the stores cheaper than budget and they have smaller ingots that are easier to deal with when you are first starting out. (California, Phoenix ect) https://www.industrialmetalsupply.com/
I'm not quite an amateur, and have done quite a bit with aluminum, but my foundry is getting old and struggles with pure copper. Sil-bronze looks nice! Anyone looked or tried https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Aluminum-Bronze-Melting-Copper-and-Aluminum/ ?
I melt aluminum bronze on occasion. That's a 90/10 hammer head. It needs a cover flux like other copper alloys. I've been successful with charcoal and a little copper phosphor.
I started reading that instructable... Then I got to the part where the guy calls his furnace a foundry, that's where I quit. Here is a thread that is worth looking at. http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showt...ll-parts-in-copper-alloys&p=212883#post212883
