Had my first experience with 3D sand printed molds today. The surface and detail on these molds are incredible! Sorry that I am unable to take pics of them to share with you guys but maybe I can get some tomorrow after we pour the castings...during mold separation. If you guys have never had a chance to see them or to use them I would encourage you all to try. I am a little concerned with gas in the castings as perm will most likely be much lower than with our regular molds. We should get no sand wash whatsoever, so the gating will be the only culprit to blame if there are any inclusions. In my defense though I did not know we were making sand printed molds at the time and I set the gating up for our production line. These are fairly big castings. Around 14 inch diameter with an average wall thickness of around .200". It is a new grill that I helped design ( I design the functional parts and base model and then send it to a professional designer to make it all pretty) that we hope to add to our product line very soon. We will take these castings and test them and send them to sales and marketing for review. I made a prototype of it last summer and it worked really well. I hope it turns out nice and defect free. I will update you guys tomorrow on the results and try to get some pics for you if possible.
Billy, Do you have that capability at the business or do you contract the print work outside? Best, Kelly
We contracted them through Hoosier pattern in Indiana. We are looking at purchasing a 3D printer in the very near future but based off of initial cost and the footprint size of a sand printer we will probably opt for a cheaper and smaller plastic or metal one.
We poured the molds this morning and they turned out very nice! Much better than any of our previous prototyping efforts. I am sure we will be doing more of this in the future.
So...final update. We cleaned the castings and had rougher surface than I expected and also had little bit of burn in. I think in the future we will probably use a mold coating to help with that. Still much better than previous prototyping efforts and much easier to work with. The castings beside roughness are defect free. I would really love for my company to get a sand printer.LOL
