This guide is legendary. It helped me to learn and follow the process, and I made some pretty successful parts. For example, my own keycaps for all keyboards that I use: much larger than usual (for my large fingers), with a pleasant gently matte texture, in beautiful colors.
Polyurethane resins are an amazing achievement, and very much underrated. So are platinum-cure silicones. With care, you can get design-to-parts precision of ±25μm, which is spectacular (and a bit surprising, too). The fact that modern polyurethane resins (Sika Biresin F50) have essentially zero shrink helps quite a bit, too.
Incidentally, there is a whole bunch of youtubers doing casting using epoxy resins, or cheap silicones, there is a large following, but this is not representative of what the techniques really allow.
If you want to step up from 3d-printing, this is the way to go! Especially given the proliferation of inexpensive desktop CNCs with really good precision (Makera and others).
Those resins are absolutely fantastic but do read the MSDS and be very careful, it doesn't take much to get yourself in the emergency ward with that stuff. Another risk to be acutely aware of is that these reactions usually are exothermic and can go runaway faster than you can blink of the conditions are right.
Of course, one should always read the MSDS. I use a 3M respirator with VOC inserts while working on these things. However, one should mention that a) polyurethane resins and platinum-cure silicones are much safer than many other compounds, and b) polyurethane resins are different from the more common epoxy resins and reactions are only very slightly exothermic. It's not a problem like when you're building a river table.
As a rough estimate, using a resin 3d printer is more problematic than these compounds.
A CNC router is on my list of tools to figure out and own. Routing aluminium, wood, and things like HDPE and being able to make moulds for silicones and resin? Yes please. 3D printing on the other hand never appealed to me.
I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced.
Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.
which a couple of projects have copied (with attribution) and at least one company copied (w/o acknowledgement).
3D printing seems to have taken up a lot of this interest due to how much easier is to source and load filament and start a print and how good opensource slicers are as opposed to traditional CAM software.
One thing which has helped it be somewhat timeless is only covering mechanical and geometric considerations in detail --- rather than cover software specifics it off-loads things to the Wikipedia article on Computer Aided Manufacturing, which has seen a lot of edits since this page was first put up --- my own usage has gone from my first project:
- requiring that I make a font with a character which had all the text and markings of a caliper dial using FontForge
That said, there are still some folks making new software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638498 and FreeCAD's 1.1 release seems a big update (despite the new book _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ being branded version 1.1 on the cover but telling one to download 1.0 or later and providing screengrabs and instructions for 1.0).
11 comments
Polyurethane resins are an amazing achievement, and very much underrated. So are platinum-cure silicones. With care, you can get design-to-parts precision of ±25μm, which is spectacular (and a bit surprising, too). The fact that modern polyurethane resins (Sika Biresin F50) have essentially zero shrink helps quite a bit, too.
Incidentally, there is a whole bunch of youtubers doing casting using epoxy resins, or cheap silicones, there is a large following, but this is not representative of what the techniques really allow.
If you want to step up from 3d-printing, this is the way to go! Especially given the proliferation of inexpensive desktop CNCs with really good precision (Makera and others).
As a rough estimate, using a resin 3d printer is more problematic than these compounds.
Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339459 (157 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645605 (74 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41989322 (106 comments)
Note that there's a version of it as a single page: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/full/ which is a bit easier to reference.
Used it a lot as a guide when working on the Shapeoko wiki (which is now off-line), so maybe some of it survives in:
https://shapeokoenthusiasts.gitbook.io/shapeoko-cnc-a-to-z
which a couple of projects have copied (with attribution) and at least one company copied (w/o acknowledgement).
3D printing seems to have taken up a lot of this interest due to how much easier is to source and load filament and start a print and how good opensource slicers are as opposed to traditional CAM software.
One thing which has helped it be somewhat timeless is only covering mechanical and geometric considerations in detail --- rather than cover software specifics it off-loads things to the Wikipedia article on Computer Aided Manufacturing, which has seen a lot of edits since this page was first put up --- my own usage has gone from my first project:
- requiring that I make a font with a character which had all the text and markings of a caliper dial using FontForge
- Making G-code for that w/ F-Engrave: https://www.scorchworks.com/Fengrave/fengrave.html
- Making the G-code for a fixture and the balance of the design using a Flash file: https://github.com/Jack000/PartKAM
- sending the design using a Python file, bCNC: https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC
(ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D)
These days, I'd just draw it up in Carbide Create: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing make toolpaths in that application: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/toolpaths and then send the G-code using Carbide Motion: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/machine-motion (other manufacturers have similar workflows or bundle commercial software such as CarveCo or Vectric, and of course, there's Autodesk Fusion 360 which has taken up just about all the oxygen for free usage) and I've moved on to making my own project using Open(Python)SCAD:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
That said, there are still some folks making new software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638498 and FreeCAD's 1.1 release seems a big update (despite the new book _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ being branded version 1.1 on the cover but telling one to download 1.0 or later and providing screengrabs and instructions for 1.0).