Interesting thought I just had:

3D Printing
, , ,
1

Interesting thought I just had: Does anyone currently sell an incredibly low-density filament used for modeling that would be easy to sand away?

This kind of material might be super good for model making, where a lot of manual detail work needs to be done.

I guess the problem with that is that fine details might be incredibly brittle, right?

Is there a good candidate for something that is both easily sandable, but strong enough that small details aren’t brittle?

I was also thinking that lower density materials may allow more ‘experimental’ printing prior to printing the real thing; is that even worth exploring?

2

They make a blue wax thats very easy to machine with very small diameter and long length tspered profile mills. But I don’t think that’s what your really asking for.

3

If you were careful about your toolpaths, balsa wood might do what you’re talking about. It’s not exactly brittle, although details do get damaged very easily.

4

The waxes used for investment molding would probably be a good starting point. Not the lowest density but easy to work with and holds details well

5

I’ve printed with stuff from http://machinablewax.com and it’s done pretty well, and generally I like machining wax.

6

Renshape maybe

7

Maybe they should make a balsa pla blend like they do with timber

8

for those kind i use micro glas holow spheres - you mix them with a binder like epoxy - but i would assume you can also use a Polyamide matrix ρ~1g/cm³ and print them.

9

Hand sculptable or printable? eSun offers a very low temperature 3d pen filament. Supposedly prints at 100°C. Most of the fiber filled plastics greatly improve sandability over the unfilled but those are more expensive than the base plastic. Maybe do wet sanding?

10

@John_Bump , that’s a PERFECT solution! It’s decently cheap, easily sandable, machinable, etc. Thank you, did not know such a filament existed.

11

I will say it’s a bear for adhesion, and at least on my printer, it tends to shrink in as you print so it’s hard to get dimensional stability. But it does work, and it’s sure easy to work with afterwards if you have tooling for working with wax, like jewelry tools.

12

I would think low density also means it would be easily jammed in the filament pushing area as it might want to go out the side or whatever instead of down the tube or hotend. In other words, I think it may suffer from flexible filament issues.