3D printing and bronze casting

[graham mcdonald]

I am investigating making a small run of cast bronze mandolin tailpieces for a mandolin quartet building project. I am thinking that a 3D printed prototype might be used for the casting mould. I know little about 3D printing and less about casting bronze, so all suggestions welcomed. An alternative might be getting someone to CNC machine the tailpieces out of brass sheet. Either approach will doubtless involve some kind of 3D graphics file to tell the printer or the CNC machine what to do and while I have done a little doodling with 2D design software, 3D seems rather more complicated. Again all suggestions welcomed. The idea is that the tailpiece will be flat and hang off a bolt vertically inserted into the tailblock. The first prototype uses a 10mm barrel nut fitted into the tailblock from the back and an M6 bolt through the soundboard. That seems to work OK but my attempts at cutting out a flat tailpiece from 1/16" brass sheet is not pretty. Metalwork is not an activity I enjoy very much.

Thanks

[Semmens Guitars]

Hi Graham,
Send me a drawing with measurements and if is not to hard I will draw up a 3D image and send it through to you.

[graham mcdonald]

Thank you. I will draw it up this afternoon.
Graham

[blackalex1952]

You Tube lost wax casting methods. Cheers! Ross

[nicco]

Not the same, but similar; I've sand cast a sterling silver pendant in much the same as the method you're wanting; i sketched it, converted that to a 3d file in fusion 360, cut the design out of lino (like kids carving and printing lino) with a small cnc router, then made a sand mould from that. You can buy sterling silver casting grain pretty cheaply, and just used an Amazon hand held crucible and a bunnings mapp gas torch to melt the silver.

With sand moulding you can't have any overhangs on your part (well, not without getting really tricky anyway) and the part works better if it's reasonably consistent thickness.

I'm a hell of a long way from an expert on this stuff, just playing around with it, but happy to help with tips. I failed a hell of a lot of times before getting my final cast product. Ha ha.