I tried Injection Molding using a 3D Printer!

even designed so that it has a small draft angle on vertical surfaces that makes de

molding

significantly easier, and you will find them almost anywhere. If you know about this, you won't be able to unsee it, believe me! Anyway, instead of a flat cut, I drew a spline in Fusion and used it to cut my mold in half, which shouldn't leave me with almost no cuts. While making such a mold in metal would be quite a task, printing it in resin is no more difficult than a flat mold, and again it looked great in Formlabs' 10k resin.

Since the volume of this part is a little bigger, I adjusted my GCode and did the first test, which took a little longer. Not much material came out the side of the nozzle, which was a good sign. Opening the mold was exciting because it looked like it could easily fill the entire cavity and even the little foot holes. I was a little impatient and unmolded the piece a little early, which not only warped it because it was still soft but also showed me that my “almost no undercut” model had some undercuts, and I was sure it would have been a painful or even impossible to demold a completely solidified piece of PLA.

That's why I switched to the material I wanted to use for my Mini Me anyway, which was flexible TPU. Although flexes normally can't be extruded that quickly, Magneto handled it very well and produced a perfect Mini Stefan on the first shot. I was honestly very impressed with the details he was able to reproduce. Also, the next pieces came out flawless and it was really interesting to see how the material contracted as it cooled, making a hole in the sprue. Also, my hook, which was very difficult to make in PLA, turned out perfectly in TPU. At one point I got too brave and

tried

to hold the mold with just my hands, which demonstrated what fleshing is and why a rigid mold with a clamp is so important.

As a last ditch effort, I finally wanted to build my Super Extruder! When I was at RMRRF this year, I purchased the Takoto HE50 hotend which not only has two ultra-long heating cartridges but also a nozzle that is incredibly long and should give us optimal melting performance. I designed a bracket for an Orbiter LDO extruder and installed everything on a replacement tooling board that fits my tooling head test rig

printer

. This of course allowed the small molds to be easily filled with TPU, but I designed an even larger version of my Mini Stefan with a handle on top for a keychain.

And even this one filled out beautifully, left me with an amazing DIY

injection

molded piece and shows off nicely what this process can do! As a last project, I wanted to try some over

molding

and I've already designed a mold that goes over a hex wrench. However, due to time constraints and technical difficulties, I was unable to finish it. If you're interested in the results, follow my Twitter or Instagram where I'll post photos once I've

tried

it. Since I was curious, I went back to PLA and tried this simple mold of an M4 screw I made, and it had serious problems filling it again.

I played around with the parameters a bit and got a working screw out of the mold, but I never managed to fill the hexagon. Perhaps the

injection

pressure of a 3D print is the limiting factor or our grades of 3D printing materials are not suitable for injection molding. At this point, I also stopped working on the project. So the key takeaways are: a high flow hotend is very crucial, preheating the mold helps,

using

the right type of plastic is important and high injection pressure is needed for complex molds. And we started the process for small parts.

However, do you think it makes sense to continue refining it and how would you approach it? Leave a comment below! Thank you all for watching! I hope you found this video interesting! If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a YouTube patron or member. Also check out the other   videos in my library! I hope to see you next time! Auf wiedersehen and goodbye!