Aluminum Octopus

Here is another 3d print from thingiverse:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27053
It is titled Makerbot Cute Octopus Says Hello by Jason

I decided to try out casting 3d Printed objects, so one morning I made a bunch of objects and scaled them down to be easier to cast with the setup we were using. I also made a bottle opener and a Maltese Falcon. I have done lost wax casting in highschool in an art class so this wasn’t the first time I have done it. We made enough plaster to fill a couple flasks. That was enough for us to get started with. My friend Alex was a big help in getting all this done from the casting aspect.

Alex did the burnout using a kiln that will get hot enough to vaporize all of the ABS out so we just used that and the flasks that were available. We preheated the flasks the day we cast before putting the metal in. He actually has a vacuum setup that works nicely for this. We melted the aluminum with a acetylene torched, then poured the metal in and flipped the vacuum on. Then we waited for the metal to stop glowing red.

At this point we were both pretty anxious. Did the aluminum actually pour in or did it just puddle at the top? Oh no was this a failure?

After it cooled down a bit more we threw the flask into a five gallon bucket of water. The plaster disintegrated immediately. Alex reached in and pulled out the tree with the octopus and bottle opener attached. I was pretty excited to see how well this worked and the detail it gave. Casting success!!!!

We cut the sprew off and buffed him out a bit. I was amazed how well this actually worked!
We are now in the process of expanding our operations with bigger flasks. We can use the kiln to melt metal in a cruicible too. Overall I am pretty excited about this development.

If anyone is interested we may be able to do some contract work, such as 3d printing and object and casting it, feel free to contact me.