Tried other methods of making casting masters. Most work but not consistently. Resin 3D printing is expensive and labor intensive. It also fails to burn out well in my experience. FDM 3D printing using wax filament is very primitive. OK for large commercial castings but not good for jewelry making. My best results are achieved through 2 and 3 axis CNC milling directly upon solid wax. The lead photo shows double sided 2D milling of 0.180 inch sheet hard wax. The mill bit used was 0.010 inch at the tip. Ten thousands of an inch! The movie below is the milling machine in use. That's a water cooled 25,000 rpm spindle running at 15.000 rpm. Carving time was about three hours. Faster th...

I presently have 2.5 Cetus 3D printers. That means two that work and one damaged by a lightning strike. Insurance replaced the broke one with new. About $300. They are not terribly expensive. Many 3D printers can cost 10 time that amount.  I am repairing the blown up Cetus. However, no guarantee. I have bought new all the repair parts out of my own pocket.. Far better to replace the entire printer than repair but I just can't throw away the old hardware. It's hopefully just the electronics that were fried. New parts have to come from China, since it is the original Cetus and no parts are stocked in the USA. That may take a month as I figured it was not...

Trying again to combine Lost Wax Casting and 3D printing. I am working on a new system where I print master wax models with a 3D FDM (filament type) printer. One of the filaments I am testing first is actually real casting wax. Stay tuned here and I'll report how the effort progresses. As of this posting, it will be Late July 2020 before I am operational.

This is a great example of model making. Wallace is the man and Gromit is his dog. They are the main characters in a British Claymation cartoon series I have long enjoyed. Here is a link: https://wallaceandgromit.com.Also a WikiPedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_and_Gromit. If you have never seen the movies, your life is probably not complete. Ha! I found the .stl files for these models. I don't remember exactly where, but an Internet search should locate them if you are interested. The parts were all printed on my Anycubic Delta printer. Resolution (layer height) is 100 microns for all parts. Slow printing but the surface finish is excellent. Eight colors of PLA filament are ...

his is another Thingiverse print. I thought the "Steampunk" detail was interesting and a challenge for the printer. No challenge for the A/C Kossel delta. When I design something like this it is more towards function than appearance. I just did that. I made a toothpick holder about this same size. See pix. Not that I need a toothpick holder. I made two version of the cap, with and without a dispensing hole. More as a design exercise.I was using the toothpicks as glue applicators. They are already in a nice dispenser/holder but I just thought, "I need to design a 3D printed toothpick dispenser/holder... just because I can."Both items may be just Junque. It's all in the mind of the maker... Ha...

Been printing on the WanHao D7 Replicator with Wanhao green resin and slicing files with Wanhao D7 Workshop. You can see in the Pix it is working well. I made a modification to the Wanhao D7 stock build plate. I used a whetstone I have and ground off the high polish on the build surface. It is not rough like sandpaper but it now has some "tooth". It's a grey color but still quite smooth. Start layers are now holding much better. I plan on adapting an EPAX build pate to the D7. More on that after I do it.

Fired up the Wanhao D7 (DLP printer) and made a few resin prints. The red fish is casting resin and the owls and rook are Wanhao black resin. All the resins are about a year old, so I wan't sure if there was a do not exceed shelf life. I did my "super clean" post process with IPA, ultrasonic cleaner (detergent), heated vacuum chamber and UV cure light. The ultrasonic step may be overkill as I think with the vacuum and UV light, a tiny bit of uncured surface resin may assist with a bit smoother finish cure. For casting burn out the very slight (tacky) uncured surface resin is a problem for the investment material, but for normal prints, it may ba benefit. I'll explore that with future prints....

I bought some PETG solid color blue and green filament months ago. I used some of the blue but was not producing good prints. I thought it was because I had not run enough trial prints to get the settings accurate in the Smplify 3D slicer software. I discovered today that wasn't the problem. The print nozzle in my printer was so worn out, none of the settings in Simplify 3D could ever be close to correct. I installed a new nozzle and almost instantly the PETG started printing beautifully. Here is a link to the nozzle problem I reported in Dimensional Print Studio (https://dimensionalprint.org) I had been using the one nozzle for well over six months. Lesson learned is that nozzles do wear ou...

In this blog and elsewhere, we have pushed the limits of Single Board Computers (SBC) to do conventional personal and Internet computer tasks. Although they are capable, the reality is that they don't do it as well as bigger computer systems designed for the task. What is proved is that expensive hardware is not necessary to get started exploring the possibilities of computer applications. Fully functional SBC systems are available at very reasonable, even very low cost. No claim that SBC is the best for every application. The SBC is a hardware and software hacker's delight. The SBC is the solution for special purpose and custom applications. The task of running modern commercial application...

Not seeing double. There are two PI's in the picture. Raspberry Pi to be exact. These are two credit card size, fully operational computers. The one with the cables connected is the only one operating in the picture. These little baby computers are fully functional as any PC personal computer. They operate using the Linux operating system. The amazing part is the cost. It is $35.00 More information on these interesting computers will certainly make it into these pages For now,check out this link to their home page: .https://www.raspberrypi.org/ Update: Find more here: https://ramblindan.org/?p=5002

What am I willing to do? What do I need to do? What do I have to do? Thoughts rumbling through my brain cells. It's all about 3D printing and where am I going with it to justify my "equipment lust" for better quality 3D printing machines. I have spent a few years playing with hobbyist low end machines and have, after climbing the learning curve, been able to produce some very good quality printed items. Also, a lot of what are also good quality but what I refer to as Junque items. So where is there to go to justify a high-quality pro or prosumer style 3D printer. I am looking for that personal "killer app", that application for owning and using such a machine. The purpose doesn't need to be ...

An investment in tools is required for most every craft except perhaps daydreaming. Is thinking not a type of formless tool? Let me ponder that… Just a prelude to this pricey little tool used for machine controlled (CNC) wax carving. It is an 1/8 inch shaft diameter, tapered (10 degree [total]) 0.004 inch ball end carbide milling bit. That's a mouthful. These type of bits are the smallest tip for the finest detail machine carving. Also used are 0.005", 0.010", 0.015"and 0.020" in this style. Several other bits of various designs (twisted pyramid) are commonly used. The pyramids have flat tips and are made in similar tapered tip diameters as the ball ends bits. They all are super fine needle ...

This is my favorite go-to FDM 3D printer. It just works. It's not a fast printer. Speed is not what I expect. Slow is good when the output quality is excellent. MamaCetus has it's own slicer software and G-Code generator called UPStudio. Cetus is a printer made by Tiertime. It will also run G-Code produced by other software such as Simplify3D. I have done so many times. I usually just run the printer UPStudio as the quality is very good even if a bit slow. Here it is printing one of my original designs, a small container vessel. The filament is eSun PLA+ Pine Green at 215 deg.C. with 150 micron layer height. 0.04MM nozzle. Print time will be a bit over 6 hours.

Posting here in the middle of a project. Gotta start somewhere. Been doing LWC (Lost Wax Casting) for a few years. Created a small business called KautzCraft for the silver jewelry and any other "crafty" items I want to sell. The primary goal is to enjoy the work and to at least break even as a business. I have taken perhaps 500 to 1000 pictures of this work. There are several other web sites where most of the photos are displayed. KautzCraft.com and workshop.ramblindan.org/jla/ . I'll toss in a few spare pix here in RDforum from time to time. This picture is of two wax models of a design I created called a Fluer-de-Cross. They are sprued and ready to be put in a metal tube and investment (p...

These boxes are a 50% downsize of the Jewelry box shown in the previous post. One is 50% and the other is sized at 51% due to my experimentation with fitting clearances in that small of a downsize. Turns out there is no issue at all with the parts fitting together. Now there are two new boxes The big roses in the right hand insert don't print properly that small, but they cleaned up enough to be presentable. They don't look like roses, though... maybe daises, Ha! Printed using PLA on the Cetus 3D printer.

Not one of my designs but it is how I would design a box like this. It is large, thick walled, and heavy. It's also printed with PLA/wood. Hatchbox brand in this case.. Presently a work-in-progress and will require a lot of material and printing time. But that is OK. I have always maintained that 3D printing is not a race to see how fast the printer can run. It's all about how well it can print. Fast is not a prime requirement. The source files are here on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3304456 The top shown in the picture took almost 11 hours to print. The bottom is now on the printer and will run for about 16 hours. More info on this project will be coming... ESeven hours r...

I am sitting here after filling a few on-line store orders for my customers. I am watching "MamaCetus" (My 3D Cetus (brand) printer doing her thing. She's very slow because that IS her thing, using only 150 micron layer height. BUT she is producing outstanding 3D printing. I do almost all my printing these days at 150 microns. Sometimes I drop to 100 microns. The penalty is very long print times. The reward is very nice looking prints. When I started printing several years ago, I thought 300 microns was the normal height to print. (it was...) I considered 200 microns a venture into extreme printing. I thought 100 and 150 micron layers were impossible territory. Boy, was I wrong.. At the time...

This is an original design I created. Both the bowl and the lid. They were drawn in Autodesk Fusion 360 and exported as STL files. Then sliced by Simplify3D and exported as a gcode file to an SD memory card. The printing was made from the code on the SD card with my Anycubic Kossel (Delta) 3D printer. Layer height is 150 microns. Total print time is 12 hours for the bowl and about 4 hours for the lid. This one is the second of three I have printed. The first was clear PLA which looks white, with a blue-jeans color lid. This is of course red with a very bluish shade of green lid, (Lookds blue in the picture!) The third is printing as I write this and the bowl color is called wheat. The lid co...

 Another out-sourced design from Thingiverse. Highly detailed model, but not actually a "scale" model. More a fantasy cottage for war-gamers and miniaturists. But it is interesting. Needs a paint job to finish it off. I am giving it to Steve as encouragment to design (at least draw) his own designs. There is about 26 hours total 3D printing time. It is a game piece scale of 32mm which is nothing to do with inches or meters, but rather a rather obscure reference of popular war-gaming character height. This model is on the large size.

Just finished the three dimensional printed 1:32 scale bobber caboose. It uses Gage 1 track which is 45MM between the rails. The track is also 3D printed. This is what can be done with 3D printing. Everything but the window glass was printed.