3D Printing Metal At Home? Pretty Much! FarmCraft101

hey there welcome to farmcraft this is a gear but not just any gear this is a bronze herringbone gear these are notoriously hard to make but i was able to make this easily quickly with minimal skill and cheaply and i'm going to show you how to do it too basically anything that you can 3d print you can reproduce in metal at home let me say that again anything you can 3d print you can reproduce in metal i'm talking about bronze brass copper aluminum even cast iron this is an amazingly powerful technique what i'm talking about is lost pla casting pla is the thermoplastic that is commonly used for 3d printing it's polylactic acid i'm going to take you through the whole process in this video show you everything you need to know and all the equipment that you're going to need so to start out with this is called a loop pole and this would attach like on a door or a hatch or something on a boat and it would allow you to then pull that open it's my parents old wooden boat and this broke and they couldn't find a place that they could buy bronze ones they found them in stainless steel but that wouldn't match the boat so they asked me if i could make a bronze one and i thought that would be a perfect time to to use this technique now this part could be made in a lot of ways but it's not the simplest of parts and i'm just talking about this piece here it has an angle on it to help you hook your finger now how could you make that there's several options you could get some quarter inch bronze you could cut out the shape drill a hole and file it that would take you some time and have you priced bronze lately that would be pretty expensive you could use some bronze tubing and basically on a blade you could you could make the round part and then you could braise on this tab and that would work fine you could probably even get the brazing to match well enough that it wouldn't be that obvious and you could sand cast it to be fair this would be a relatively easy part to sand cast you'd have to add some draft and then do some filing at the end but we're going to make this with lost pla so i'm using fusion 360 to make this part now if the part that you want to make already exists you can just download it on the internet and you don't have to do any of this this designing but fusion 360 is free and it's not it's not too hard to learn basically you sketch out the outline and then you extrude it and here i'm adding some angles to the edges and then i go underneath and i add that angle to make it easy to hook with your finger and there you go i send it over to my 3d printer mine is a creality cr10 so there you go i've got it suspended in a cup and i left this end long that's going to be the pour spout and the idea is that i'm going to put plaster all around that and let it set in place then i'm going to burn the pattern out then we're going to fill it full of bronze now certainly possible that there's air bubbles and that's not going to be a great mold but i don't know it's pretty fluid right now and it you know i was pounding it down i think maybe that'll work and if that's going to work you know good enough is good enough there's no reason to make it harder than it needs to be so we'll give that a try this is just a little electric tabletop furnace first i'm going to dry out the mold i'm just going to do this at 100c for a couple hours i'm going to go ahead and invert it over this pan because as i raise the temperature the plastic is going to start dripping out i've been at around 240 for the last few hours uh that's fahrenheit so that should have driven off all the water in the mold so we are going to go up to 450 degrees now all right it's been at 450 for several hours now nothing really exciting to see in there so we are gonna take it up now i'm gonna go actually just take it up to 1200. so i may have messed it up when i cranked it up to 1200 it might have been too fast there you can see how cracked up it is but the cracks don't look like they're penetrating all the way to the center um it's such a small simple part i'm going to go ahead and try and pour it so here's some bronze it's actually from their boat uh some bronze from a piece of trim or something that they replaced so let's put that in the crucible and we'll start heating that up try and give this a pour and i have to be fast because it's such a small amount of metal i know it's going to cool very quickly yeah went right through the plaster that's all right it doesn't always work the first time lesson learned i poured it in the top there but it all just came out the bottom you can see where the metal just poured out of the side it's surprising i had part of my ring at least i made something the tape keeps this from pushing it down too far but then that's enough weight to just keep it right where it is so that looks good then it cracked too that's frustrating i have no idea why that cracked what i'm thinking is maybe i need to do like a soup can a steel can around it so that i can do the burnout with the plaster supported i'm not sure if that's the best solution though so you notice there was no pour spout on there that's because i completed the burnout and you're supposed to keep it hot when you're pouring the pore temperature for the mold is 1100 degrees fahrenheit the burnout temperature was around 1300 so once i finished the burnout i just turned it down to 1100 melted my metal and poured it in well that didn't give me a chance to do anything to the mold to make a nice little pour spout i suppose i could 3d print something into the pattern i have a feeling it actually didn't go down into the cavity if i was big stack d i'd have a giant block of ice he seems to have an endless supply of those to cool this off but i'm just a farmer so we're going to use the bucket for a protein pail so if you guys haven't seen big stack d and you like watching uh melting metal you should check him out he makes melting metal fun hey look at that it's in the bottom of the mold did it fill ha that's freaking awesome i can't believe that worked can you see the lines in it you can actually see the 3d printing lines like that thing got really really detailed [Music] a common question i get is why don't you just use the item that you're trying to reproduce to make your mold and and this actually makes that example the answer is here was my mold and here's my result this is bigger than this even if i hadn't filed or sanded or anything it was significantly smaller and that's because the molten metal is this size as it's molten but then when it cools it shrinks so you end up with a smaller part than your original so you have to take that into account when you're making your pattern uh how much additional do you need you know if you wanted it to be exactly this in final dimensions you're going to need to add enough for shrinking and then also enough for finishing you know you're going to be able to want to sand it and smooth it and make it look look right i just put a cotter pin through there and there you have it that measures 1.457 this is 1.49 35 000 difference this is bigger than this bronze is real easy to patina i boiled an egg crushed it up and put it in a bag with this in there and that's the patina it gave it so there you go here's your loop pull so that was kind of cool admittedly not the coolest thing in the world because that could have been made just with sand casting let's make something cooler this is a herringbone gear so it's a combination helical gear a helical gear meaning the teeth are at an angle gives you advantages in that it can run faster it can handle higher loads than just a straight tooth gear but the problem with the helical gear is if the teeth are all in one direction and you're driving it this way well that's going to create a force in one direction so there's thrust on a helical gear that you have to have to deal with well this design gets rid of that problem because there's the angles are in both directions these are very hard to make look at that how do you make that how would you sand cast that well you can't cast it you can't sand cast it like it is you could split it in two and do two halves and generally that's how they're done you make the two halves and then you bolt them together but even if you picture just the bottom half there even removing that from the sand you would have to unscrew it from the sand you would have to pull it at that angle these are challenging to make but with this method it should be a piece of cake so let's give it a try i've printed a pour spout i'm going to fill the plaster up to there so basically i'm going to hot glue it like that and this is going to hold it in position while the plaster is setting 400 grams of powder to 160 grams of water this one i'm gonna put the plaster in first this is just an old ceramic kiln i got this on craigslist i think i spent it was either 100 or 150 bucks i put some insulation on it it probably wasn't necessary but i had it just to uh just to make it more efficient this has a ramp and soak function which means you can program it to set a temperature and then slowly increase to another temperature and then hold it level at that temperature and then go up some more which is exactly what i need to do with this so that's going to make cooking off automatic basically i put it in i hit go and i walk away come back 12 hours later and it'll be it'll have done all the work for me so for not much money you can look around on craigslist these things are uh are very plentiful and super useful all right so i'm ready to do the burnout so here's my mold setting it on something so that the gases have room to get out i don't want to just set it flat on the bottom so that's going to follow the recommended burnout cycle for this plaster which is this prestige oro you can see in the first hour it goes up to 300 it holds that for three hours then over another hour it goes to 700 holds that for two over two hours it goes all the way up to 1382 fahrenheit and holds that for four and then comes down to 1100 degrees is a poor temperature there you go that's how much bronze i'm gonna melt and that should be more than enough far more than i need to do these two molds so couple interesting things here i poured the small gear first and it came out really nice you know good filling of the mold on both sides top and bottom the bottom might be a little sharper than the top like those are a little bit blunted that's probably because of air pushing back not allowing the metal to completely fill the mold now i could maybe help that if i put a riser a pour spout and a riser to allow the air to escape commercially you would use a vacuum pump you basically when you're pouring you have on the bottom of your mold a suction so that it actually pulls the metal into the mold and pulls the air out making it easier to fill the mold but i'm real pleased with that especially considering i didn't even vacuum now the bigger one i poured second and you can see i have much more blunting at the tops so this one had trouble filling the mold uh more than that one did i think the metal was probably cooling off because of that it was freezing and and not pushing the air out like it did on this one maybe i could have worked a little faster now here's an interesting thing i had some air bubbles now those were in the mold those were in the plaster looks like you could just scrape those right off but they're they're cast in there they're not going anywhere there you can see the blunting on the top of the teeth and the smaller gear no air bubbles and the teeth are sharper a little blunt on top overall though these would be expensive parts if you needed one so let's talk equipment this is my 3d printer it's a creality cr10 and it's a it's got a pretty big capacity on it it's a it's a pretty nice printer printers are getting cheaper and cheaper you can get a printer on amazon right now brand new for 150 bucks but people are always upgrading their printers too so if you want a printer and you look around for used you're probably going to be able to get a certainly a decent printer for a hundred dollars this ceramic kiln with a little effort and if you're patient i think you'll be able to find one of these on craigslist or facebook marketplace for 100 bucks bucks they'll probably list it for more but i bet you'd be able to get it for that this controller for doing burnouts is awesome it's 75 bucks i wish i could say it was cheaper but man it's so worth it you'll also need a solid state relay i'll i'll leave links to all that in the description so now you need a way to melt your metal i was using this little furnace this was 500 it's nice i got it because i wanted to be able to very precisely control temperatures and very easily do small melts and it just makes it so easy when it's electric i can just set the temperature to 2000 and off it goes and the crucible is this crucible it's not a it's not a lot of material but it's quite it's quite a bit and it takes about half hour to melt it i can put it in and just walk away it is very convenient i've got a video on making this furnace this is a metal five gallon bucket with some kale wool ceramic insulation and i used a harbor freight weed torch as the burner and i used that for a long time i was able to melt up the copper which is 2000 degrees that is certainly an option and uh probably the cheapest one you're gonna have on melting metal and if you want a nicer furnace i've also got a a video on building this big guy there's a there's satanite coating in there and uh and a giant crucible um and then speaking of that crucibles uh that crucible that was in there is probably an 80 crucible this one was probably 15 25 and then 60 or something like that all depends on what size furnace you have what size crucible you're going to need well you can use a furnace like this to do both the pattern burnout as well as melting the metal there's not a lot of room in there and doing them at the same time obviously is troublesome because the temperatures are different it's really nice to have two furnaces one for the pattern and then one for the metal so for a bare minimum price list the printer would be a hundred dollars the electric kiln with controller would be 200 the basic furnace would be 100 a crucible would be 25 and the plaster is 50. that is 25 pounds of plaster that would be enough to do about 25 soup can type molds so i know people are gonna say uh you know hey that's not cheap that's five hundred dollars or even up to a thousand dollars um well i guess it's all relative this is my mill right here that was twenty five hundred dollars so just the mill costs a heck of a lot more than what you would need uh to do what i'm what i'm talking about here yeah i mean i'm not saying this stuff's free you're not going to go to a junkyard and be doing this but um it's certainly doable so i have some ideas of some interesting things i could make using this technique but i'm curious what you guys are thinking can you think of anything you'd like to see me make post a comment down below let me know what you're thinking i also want to mention that i've been approached several times by companies to put ads in my videos and i really hate ads and videos um so i have i have not done that i want to really thank my patreon supporters for supporting me they really help making it so that i don't have to turn to ads and things like that so if you guys are appreciative of the content if you learn something with the video and you want to help the channel you can join me on patreon would be awesome you can also just share and like the video that would be really helpful i hope you guys learned something useful we'll see you next time you

Channel: FarmCraft101

Views: 226,931

Rating: 4.8776612 out of 5

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Id: w3i8i-9bjqI

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Manray3726]

Slides really need to be made from steel. There is very little chance anyone is going to be able to melt steel at home. You could cast a zmak (zink aloy) slide but it would have to be blow back and not tilting browning action or other locked/delayed actions.

[u/TheCougarAce]

Definitely not for a slide but you can pretty easily make an AR lower or maybe 10/22 receiver. They won't be as strong but probably better that printed strength

[u/General-Meringue3652]

I mean it would almost certainly work with a glock 44

[u/cjtheking96]

Idk about slides but you could make ar lowers and similar things I’m sure