Injection Molds from Your 3D Printer

Last time we checked in with [CrafsMan] he had bought a benchtop injection molding machine. This time, he shows off how to 3D print molds. If you have ever had to spend to make tooling for injection molding, you’ll appreciate being able to make molds relatively inexpensively.

To test his workflow, [CrafsMan] created a little 3D figurine and brought it into TinkerCad. From there he created a mold and used Lychee Slicer to print it using resin.

There was some manual finishing needed and that poses a problem since the two halves of the mold need to line up exactly. He mentioned he should have put alignment pins in, and we agree. We might also have put a way to bolt the halves together so you could, for example, sand the two pieces as a single unit.

The molds wound up in a mold frame and the results were impressive. We can’t help but think that the machine itself shouldn’t be that hard to create. It looks like little more than an arbor press, a heat chamber, and a piston.

If you want to see more about the machine in the video, you can check out the last time we checked in on [Crafsman]. Injection molding is clearly a handy tool — sometimes literally.