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A comment on People Keeping Mold-A-Rama Alive. Parent comment

Re:People Keeping Mold-A-Rama Alive by ChuckMcM on Monday January 22, 2018 @02:51PM (#16207310)
I find myself coveting a Mold-a-rama machine to make molds for it :-). Injection molding is pretty expensive to do in small quantities, I would like to have a 'table top' machine where I could trade time for money.
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Re:People Keeping Mold-A-Rama Alive by cr0sh on Monday January 22, 2018 @03:10PM (#16207458)
Combine this:

https://makezine.com/projects/make-41-tinkering-toys/diy-inj...

With this:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Home-Plastic-Injection-Moldi...

Alternatively, you can purchase a hand injection molding machine as mentioned in the above instructable, if you don't want to build your own:

http://www.easyplasticmolding.com/model_150/home.html

...for $1800.00. So - if you have more money than time, materials and skill - well, it's possible.

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Re:People Keeping Mold-A-Rama Alive by ChuckMcM on Monday January 22, 2018 @03:28PM (#16207610)
And they are reasonably close in Scotts Valley. I'm definitely going to have to get one of those.

EDIT: Interesting that the Makezine article has a pretty big problem. It doesn't actually show you how to make the 'second half' of the epoxy mold. To make the second half, you would have to assemble the mold and then pour epoxy into the assembled mold. Depending on the material you'd probably end up some how pumping that epoxy in, and you would need to pull a vacuum on it to avoid bubbles.

Its a nit of course, but worth considering.

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Re:People Keeping Mold-A-Rama Alive by _jal on Monday January 22, 2018 @03:58PM (#16207846)
For desktop use, it seems like mold-making combined with a lab heater for ABS/whatever you're going to use would make it cheaper-still.

I used to do investment casting with silver, and that's mostly the way it worked. ABS is much lower-temp and cools faster, so some experimentation with the "crucible" would probably be in order. But that's home-brew for you.

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