"Could I cast this sprue?" Topic

Hello casting and model making experts! Hoping you can share some wisdom to help my humble first steps in home casting.

I've been working in zbrush and created my first virtual sprue. I'm intending to create a two part rubber mold and casting four or five copies of this sprue in resin. Before I go through the expense of printing and creating a mold, I was hoping you could take a look and let me know if there are any problem areas.

I intend to pour the resin into the mold from the 'bottom' of the sprue. Are my plugs between sprue and neck large enough?

This is just the first of several sprues I have planned, and once I have enough I'm hoping to get send my masters off to a professional to produce additional copies. Until the rest are ready though, I'd like to get a few dozen resin heads cast as a proof of concept and to work out the bugs in my modeling process.

Thanks! Appreciate any advice you might have!

You need to rotate the heads 90 degrees on your sprue to allow you to easily vent your undercuts. In fact I would only make the sprue with two heads each facing the opposite direction to allow you to vent both undercuts. You only need to originally do a single head, make multiple castings and then your production caster can put them on a sprue base that will work best with the medium he will be using.

Dave
WargamingMiniatures.com

BTW, nice looking heads.

Excellent! Thank you for the advice! I have some other heads I'd like to cast, but realized they have undercuts as well.

Here are the heads. You can see their sallet style helmets extend backwards. Will this be tricky to cast?

Should I rotate them when adding them to the sprue as well? Is this how I'd cut the vents?

Thanks again for any advice, it's greatly appreciated!

I always try to avoid having the parting line run down the front of the face.

Those visor heads are so very very cool. I would definitely be interested is a squad's worth of those.

Thanks! I needed them for my personal project, and didn't think anyone else would be interested. If I can get them cast I'll make them available if you'd like some.

That would be great.

if you are casting in white metal you might like to make the sprew just a bit longer to give the nipper blades some room when cutting them off.

If you only want a few models, not a commercial production run It would be much easier and cheaper in time and material to get them 3D printed, you will have to do that for the masters anyway, and as even the best casters can get defects.