SoliForum - 3D Printing Community — Wax printing?

Re: Wax printing?

2014-07-11T19:46:18Z

IanJohnson wrote:

Spammer who actually reads the threads and has coherent replies while building up the post count needed to add links. The links however have not survived.

You da man!

Re: Wax printing?

2014-07-11T17:30:29Z

Spammer who actually reads the threads and has coherent replies while building up the post count needed to add links. The links however have not survived.

Re: Wax printing?

2014-07-11T14:59:46Z

Jek wrote:

I would suggest you use a good cardstock paper and give up on the wax paper. The only printers that can print using wax are thermal printers(and that is just the wax ink)

No mention of wax paper in this thread... What's your game?

Re: Wax printing?

2014-07-11T10:42:49Z

I would suggest you use a good cardstock paper and give up on the wax paper. The only printers that can print using wax are thermal printers(and that is just the wax ink)

a 3D printer can print with any number of materials as long as the filament is available. Plastic is the most common material supported on 3D printers today. It's a petroleum based filament with high melting temperatures.

Wax is less used but can still be printed because the material used in 3D printing is usually mixed with plastic to create a photopolymer.

Note that, while plastic is used to print the full 3D object, wax is used to create only the mold for the object. This mold itself supports fine detail and is non-porous. Hence capable of creating high resolution, lifelike 3D objects.

Re: Wax printing?

2013-08-30T13:11:34Z

I had another silly idea about wax printing: If you could design an extruder for wax, you could make it take crayons as raw material :-). Easily available, any number of colors, fun for the whole family...

Re: Wax printing?

2013-08-25T13:23:51Z

Looks like Solidscape already makes a wax printer that uses the same basic technology as an inkjet printer, only with liquid wax instead of ink. Exceedingly detailed, probably exceedingly slow, and I didn't submit a quote to find out how much it costs :-).

Re: Wax printing?

2013-08-24T15:22:34Z

You would have to make sure the enclosure is very cool, with a constant air flow, cold in, cold out, as wax cooling releases it's heat to the surrounding atmosphere, therefore raising ambient temps.
Just something to think about.
Maybe set up a duct from your air conditioner blowing across the build platform with a duct out the other side, so as to not cool the extruder too much, but to keep the build platform cool, as well as the area directly above it.
You almost would have to make a duct the blows just below the extruder tip, but with only enough force to cool without distorting the extruded wax.....

I'm going cross eyed

Wax printing?

2013-08-24T13:59:03Z

I'd probably never try this, but I wonder if it is possible to feed beeswax or paraffin (probably already melted) through an extruder and cool it off enough as it is extruding to solidify? (No doubt a completely different kind of extruder would be required).

Seems like wax would be really easy to reuse compared to ABS since you could melt and filter it as many times as you needed to while getting the model just right. (Or even go with lost wax casting to get the part in metal).

Naturally, you'd also have to worry a lot about wax running everywhere and catching on fire (one of the reasons I doubt I'd try it :-).