Wax (Paraffin) as material

Hi folks. I'm interested in building a reprap (one day), though it won't be for a while. I'm wondering if anyone has used paraffin wax or similar to build a model for sand mould making for casting of metal. Would you need to heat the wax to keep it liquid? or pre-form it into long strands first?

Even if the model wasn't high res, it would be a good starting point and holes could be filled in by hand, etc.


Thanks!

This is one of the topics that is brought up over and over; however, no one has put in the time to make it work, or posted their progress if they have.

can you get finely powdered wax? can you distribute it layer at a time into a build tank? both of these are theoretically possible... if you can manage that, odds are very good we can find a solution with heated air, focused light, or lasers!

extruding wax has the problem of making the input compatible (producing rods, or modifying the extrude head to suit something else), and fine tuning the output so the liquid wax consistently stays where it belongs.

At a previous employer we had a Xerox printer that use what Xerox called "Solid Ink" which is actually a large bar of some sort of wax. If you removed the bar before it was gone it had a cone shape at the end. When it started to get low you simply lifted a spring lever and inserted the new bar behind the existing one.

Then the printer had been sitting idle for awhile it took forever to warm up and if someone moved it before they let it cool down we ended up having to send it off for repair because the wax would get gummed up. I wish I could have taken it part as I am extremely interested how they mixed the different colors of wax before printing to get the all of the colors printable; but I wasn't in a position to do so.

Alternatively, you could use the tried-and-tested ABS plastic to mould your reprapped item, not wax, and then cast the ABS in high-temp casting plaster. Finally, heat the entire thing up to 1200+ degrees, and hte ABS will be no more, leaving a perfectly shaped hol for pouring your metal into. THis is what the commercial casting companies do with your wax objects anyway when you send them out to be done. :-)