Moulds, machining, ABS plastic and resins

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I am a noob to the casting and printing world. Hope questions about moulds and resins are OK on this forum.
There is an enclosure for y electronics project that I am currently using; it is made of ABS plastic, rather small (130mm x 22mm x 65mm) and requiring quite some machining - 15 -20 minutes worth of it on each piece. The enclosures are inexpensive as they are but all the machining is rather time consuming, not to mention that i am not able to do the cleanest job in the world with my tools.

So I was thinking about two ways to cut down on my workload and get finer results:

  1. Make a hard (resin?) mould and accurately drill that one, then use it for drilling the premade ABS enclosures.

  2. Make a silicone mould (actually two or four such moulds) and use them to pour new enclosures, already shaped and drilled to spec. Such poured enclosures would be made out of a resin that resembles plastic (or maybe liquid aluminum if I could work out the screw holes to accept screws).

Does any of the two sound like a good idea ? I shall have small runs of maybe 50 - 100 pieces / year.

Thank you

2

If all it entails is some drilling of holes, I would recommend the first option where you 3d print a drill guide with all the holes printed accurately and then simply use that to drill the holes. Make sure you 3d print and then assemble with appropriate drill bushings that you can buy off the shelf.

Number two also works but is quite labor intensive.

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3

The first option is a good one. The better you make the drill fixture, the faster the process will go. Good luck.

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