Resin Casting

[iandt]

First: Welcome !!!
Second: That "printed" Gondola, looks GREAT!
Third: Give the first two lines of my signature some thought, and keep trying.
and lastly....... to our little bit of "Model Railroading Heaven" :mrgreen:
Looking forward to seeing a bit more of your work.

Thanks for such kind words, I will certainly be visiting this site often!

Why not just keep printing new models up? If its a cost thing, I don't think anyone is going to do this work for you and not charge you almost as much.

As far as your experience with resin casting goes, what happened? Have you tried to cast this model yet? What did you try?

3d Printing this one car cost $101, so there's no way anyone could justify printing multiple for that much. The problem is that the most common ABS 3d printers all "pixelate," in a sense, the model, and destroy rivet detail, subtle surface texture, etc. So the only way capture HO models cleanly is with a resin printer, which is expensive.

Basically the last few times I have tried to mold, it's been a number of issues. My mold designs have not worked, and the resin has hardened before it got into all parts of the model. I finally learned that I need to have an escape route for air to carry the resin through the model, but then I end up with bubbles. I would rather mold it as a single piece than in "kit form," as the last time I attempted casting thin panels I wound up with more bubbles, and resin did not fill the mold correctly.

I kind of boiled my bad experience down to one main issue: the last few times I have attempted molding I used Composimold, which captured the details well but was damaged with each successive casting and proved not to be very strong. Which mold material have you used in the past with success?