Creating molds from 3D Printing?

[navkram]

IF you need to do a lot of molding you may want to check out this roto-mold that looks like it will be on kickstarter soon. RotoMAAK

thank you Jzatopa, for this link.

Being new to this forum but not new to 3d printing and mold making I did not want to make it feel I was only spamming the forum, and hopefully can contribute to this forum.

I am the creator and builder of the RotoMAAK, we have done lots of testing and prototyping to get a solid machine, we are finishing up the final info for the kickstart campaign.

this was developed out of a need that I had, a customer came to me and wanted a scale model sample of a large rotational cast plastic part to justify the change to a $80,000 mold, I printed a scale model of the part close to 12 hr print time for the first one, they past this on to their customer for the engineering department to show the salesmen what the proposed changes were going to be. once in the hands of the sales department they got the green light to make the changes. meanwhile the sales department loved the model and request 10 more "salesman" samples to allow the sales to show their customers since the actual part was the size of truck bed and it has been easier for them to sell the product if the customer can hold the part.

to reproduce 10 samples on my printer would take min. 120 hours of print time not including failed prints etc. so I made a silicon mold of the printed part and developed the rotomaak to cast hollow parts, I could have cast the part solid but that was just a waste of resin, 5 lbs of resin compared to a couple ounces.

I took the first machine to the detroit makers faire to just have sitting the running because it looks cool spinning. I got tremendous response from other makers on what niche this machine could fill. so with the support of a few key companies I proceeded to make changes and now we are very close for release.