• Tweet

• Tweet

Some people are just designed to push the limits of things. They see possibilities where others see limitations. And then there’s the special breed of person who finds all these new answers and then shares them with everyone else. Cosmo Wenman continues to prove himself one such person.¹

Here’s Cosmo’s latest: using a MakerBot to make a negative, that is a mold, of something, and then casting the shape in metal. Look at some of the incredible stuff he’s done with this process already.

You’ll see in the video that Cosmo’s using an acetone bath to slowly peel away the ABS mold. This isn’t necessarily something MakerBot encourages people to do, and if you choose to work with acetone, you should do it with a lot of caution. Also, note this extremely important warning on the Thingiverse page for these items:

[UPDATE: I have to point out that all the low temp "cerro--" alloys have lead and cadmium, and are toxic. You need to use proper ventilation, and keep it away from food preparation areas. In fact, I'm going to be looking into "Field's metal", which has neither lead or cadmium, and I'll report back how well that works in ABS. The objects you make *won't* be suitable for food preparation or food containers or utensils of any kind, and probably not for kids' toys either. FWIW, I've seen several gunsmithing how-to videos that don't mention toxicity of the Cerro-lines at all, and they aren't using ventilators either, but they should. For all I know it gives off gamma rays too. Here are some Material Safety Data Sheets I found:

bendalloy.co.uk/Cerrosafe.pdf
alchemycastings.com/pdf/Low158-190%28Safe%29.pdf

Now, imagine the possibilities of this process. Like he says, it’s like lost wax casting, but a few steps easier since you make the target object on your computer and there’s no “wax burnout” step at all.

 

1. In fact, we could probably declare him the champion of Thingiverse documentation. Any objections? [↩]