geekhack
geekhack Projects => Making Stuff Together! => Topic started by: hvontres on Mon, 17 August 2020, 14:53:38
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Hi,
This is kind of a very early interest check to see if anyone here has ever considered doing investment casting for keyboard cases. I have a medium to long term goal to set up a small back yard foundry for doing small batches of non-ferrous metals (aluminum, brass, bonze, zinc and maybe even copper). It seems that using the lost-plastic process, it should be possible to created fairly detailed case parts using 3d printed files.
I figure this is at least 12-18 months out, but I wanted to see if there was any interest here to get me more motivated to get going on this.
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one my favorite cases is one of the early vortex/kbtalking pure 60%, cast (aluminum?) tray mount cases. good weight & sounds much better than the plastic variants.
this would be a great way to get some decent traymount cases for a bunch of the split/ortho/ergo boards. (most of their files are open source as well). a good many of us have just stayed with the spaced FR4 plate cases or layered acrylic due to lack of better options or having a 3D printer on hand. plus, the parts would be smaller than if you were doing a TKL or full size board.... (less to go wrong)
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If a decent cast could be made of a dactyl-manuform with zinc I'd be quite interested. It's a fairly complicated shape so I imagine there would be some difficulties there however.
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I guess 'lost plastic' is like 'lost wax' but bigger? Sounds fun.
Given that machinig costs are high if you can pull off cast cases there would be interest. A build log for the forge would be great too :)
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Most backyard foundries would be hard pressed to do a single keyboard let alone several at once. It's also a rather large casting to do in an unprofessional setting (safety and quantity reasons).
Using 3d prints is possible, however it too takes some special consideration and quite a bit of time to print and another bit of time to bake off. You can't just pour in the metal, the best results I've seen were people baking the mold clean which can take hours and then poured while the mold was still hot. If it was poured while even remotely cool it didn't turn out well.
Basically you'd need two pretty large backyard size foundries or one large one and several hours, and that's per case.
Add in gas/power/fuel, your time, hassle, print times and plastic, etc.... It's not going to be cheap. It was cheap for Vortex to do it because it was done in bulk and saved them machining time, for a small batch you lose a lot of the cost advantages.