Metal Casting Zone

i've got a piece that i'd like to do multiple casts of in aluminum.

anyone have experience with a way to do many casts of the same object?

Jeffrey

welcome to the forums. your question is asked by all who start casting. the simple answer is "we all wish" if you have 2 or three small peices they can be linked up in the same box (flask) so you only pour into one mold. you can use one pattern to make up as many boxes (flasks) as you like. what most here would like is a steel mold of their favorite peices but they can cost $100,000 each plus or minus and are only good for about 500,000 peices before you need to replace them.there are many other ways that small production runs can be acheived but they all have a destructive nature to them requiring labour to remake the molds.

If the piece will split evenly into two pieces, just build what is known as a "match plate". This is just a board with the patterns, and all the gating and runners permanantly attached. You sandwich it between your flask halves, ram up one side, flip it over and ram the other side, cut the sprues and risers, split the mold and remove the match plate, clean it up, close it up, and repeat. Even if it doesn't split evenly it can still be done. I have made a simple one, I will post pics of it. I am in the process of making some rather larger and more complicated ones.

Here we go. This is for a small flask I have. I made this to cast hardware for mating pins for flasks. You can see the parts and gating on the matchplate.


And here is the cast of it

The only kicker was that fairly soon after I made this I got a whole bunch of steel flasks, and I have never finished a flask with this hardware.

thanks for sharing oddduck. your matchplate demo is one of the clearest ive seen