Cold casting

Maarten

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In the blog of Rolands Vlahovic s HMS alert I came across cold casting and looked more in detail into it.
It is a fantastic way of casting metall powders in combination with resin to create an actual metall part.
Fantastic for casting bronze or iron gun barrels.
See below a video explaining this process in detail with an Iron robot head.
Metall powders are available in better hobby shops in Iron, Aluminium, Bronze, Copper etc.
I see plenty of opportunities and think I found the solution for creating 92 guns for my future project.
Hope it helps you all and looking forward to the first results.


 
This is great video tutorial Maarten. As you said, it may come very handy when need multiple parts. Guns would definitely fit in to this category. Obviously, 3D printer would be a great help to build a model. Thanks again! The first tutorial about the mini chisels was awesome help.
 
Few years ago I was using this technique to cast certain parts for my car models. That time I was using bronze powder which was mixed with polyurethane resin, exactly like in tutorial. Because metal powder is needed the same quantity as the resin, it makes resin to be cast very stiff, and for this reason it did not penetrate to all cavities of the mold satisfactorily. So this is why I didn't continue this process any more and produced the rest of parts in an old school method.
 
Hi Moxis, did you also try lower quantities of metall and or lower viscosity resin?

Hello Maarten, it could have helped to use smaller amount of metal powder and resin with lower viscosity. But I didn't try it, and I only had one viscosity resin which I had used earlier with good results for castings without metal.
But the products I was using were different brand than yours, and it may be that the quality of resins has improved since then.
 
casting is not easy there are a lot of problems like air bubbles in the mold making process and trapped air in casting the parts if you didn't design the mold right. I found the cost of the resins, molding material, vacuum chamber etc cost way more than just buying the parts. There are a number of resins from quick setting less that I minute to 24 hours.
Casting is a fun thing to do however it is a mini hobby within this hobby it takes time and money to get it right.

we have talked about this on the forum

 
yes I did start it I have all the laser cut parts and milled out the wood package.

I just finished milling the wood for the royal James topic on planking the upper works. right now I am working on the last of the royal James so I can conclude the topic and start with the Bomb vessel X section.
 
That is GREAT NEWS Dave, I think it will be a success here on SOS, should start a thread about this project its ups and downs, it would make a good introdution to the kit. Don
 
Maarten
I also looked into this after seeing Roland's work.It seems that you must have a minimum 50% metal powder content to resin.The epoxy water clear casting resins may be the way to go.As to their pouring viscosity with the powder some experimentation is required.The product Roland is using is made by a company called Prochima and comes with the metal powder already mixed in.

Kind Regards

Nigel
 
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