Tried other methods of making casting masters. Most work but not consistently. Resin 3D printing is expensive and labor intensive. It also fails to burn out well in my experience. FDM 3D printing using wax filament is very primitive. OK for large commercial castings but not good for jewelry making. My best results are achieved through 2 and 3 axis CNC milling directly upon solid wax. The lead photo shows double sided 2D milling of 0.180 inch sheet hard wax. The mill bit used was 0.010 inch at the tip. Ten thousands of an inch! The movie below is the milling machine in use. That's a water cooled 25,000 rpm spindle running at 15.000 rpm. Carving time was about three hours. Faster th...

Trying again to combine Lost Wax Casting and 3D printing. I am working on a new system where I print master wax models with a 3D FDM (filament type) printer. One of the filaments I am testing first is actually real casting wax. Stay tuned here and I'll report how the effort progresses. As of this posting, it will be Late July 2020 before I am operational.

An investment in tools is required for most every craft except perhaps daydreaming. Is thinking not a type of formless tool? Let me ponder that… Just a prelude to this pricey little tool used for machine controlled (CNC) wax carving. It is an 1/8 inch shaft diameter, tapered (10 degree [total]) 0.004 inch ball end carbide milling bit. That's a mouthful. These type of bits are the smallest tip for the finest detail machine carving. Also used are 0.005", 0.010", 0.015"and 0.020" in this style. Several other bits of various designs (twisted pyramid) are commonly used. The pyramids have flat tips and are made in similar tapered tip diameters as the ball ends bits. They all are super fine needle ...