hi, I'm new to the forum, just bought a 3d printer because I had the vision of 3d printing wax models and investment casting them, in my head this was a quick way to produce cast parts for prototyping quickly, but it didn't really match with what these printers are capable of. My background is in machining, I now own a shop with a bridgeport, rockwell lathe, harig surface grinder, haas vf-2 with 4th axis, haas tl-1, and am generally in the field of helping companies finalize designs by getting a working part out very fast for testing. I have used the printer a couple times to make simple parts which were then used to make bonded sand molds for casting, but for the really advanced stuff I want to do, I think what I need is something that can print binder into sand, to build a sand casting mold directly. this would allow for some really interesting capability, in that certain molded features would be almost impossible to do with conventional methods.

Here's where I'm at.

I purchased some larger steppers, drivers and power supplies, and have an extra arduino controller from my ft-5, in my head what I'd like to figure out how to build would be basically an inkjet print head that would print a binder onto a sand layer in a co2 atmosphere, the binder reacts with the co2 and hardens, allowing for deposition of the next layer. I believe I could use fuel injectors as the control valves for each nozzle in the head, since they're designed to be used at high pressure and switch at very high speeds. building the hardware will be, well, a no brainer for me, because that's what I do all day. Developing the software, however, would be a challenge, since I really don't have the time to learn all the intricacies of turning an stl file into a surface slice, then into a bitmap, then into instructions for the print head, is there anyone here who really likes to play with software or someone who has already built a printer like this?

p.s. I know they're commercially available, but I'm not sure what the immediate return on a machine like this would be, so I'm not comfortable with diving in if I could build one and figure out if there's a good market for its use