This guide is legendary. It helped me to learn and follow the process, and I made some pretty successful parts. For example, my own keycaps for all keyboards that I use: much larger than usual (for my large fingers), with a pleasant gently matte texture, in beautiful colors.
Polyurethane resins are an amazing achievement, and very much underrated. So are platinum-cure silicones. With care, you can get design-to-parts precision of ±25μm, which is spectacular (and a bit surprising, too). The fact that modern polyurethane resins (Sika Biresin F50) have essentially zero shrink helps quite a bit, too.
Incidentally, there is a whole bunch of youtubers doing casting using epoxy resins, or cheap silicones, there is a large following, but this is not representative of what the techniques really allow.
If you want to step up from 3d-printing, this is the way to go! Especially given the proliferation of inexpensive desktop CNCs with really good precision (Makera and others).
Polyurethane resins are an amazing achievement, and very much underrated. So are platinum-cure silicones. With care, you can get design-to-parts precision of ±25μm, which is spectacular (and a bit surprising, too). The fact that modern polyurethane resins (Sika Biresin F50) have essentially zero shrink helps quite a bit, too.
Incidentally, there is a whole bunch of youtubers doing casting using epoxy resins, or cheap silicones, there is a large following, but this is not representative of what the techniques really allow.
If you want to step up from 3d-printing, this is the way to go! Especially given the proliferation of inexpensive desktop CNCs with really good precision (Makera and others).