Thanks for the add. New to 3d printing. Have done a couple small items at the library that I have glued to wood to create vacuum form molds for RC cars. Would like to do larger parts of the molds. Which printer? Prusa? CR-10? Robo?
Printer filament?
Also would like to do RC car parts possibly in nylon and or carbon fiber?
Using freeCAD to design as of now with their mesh function. Really new but know I want to get into it further.
Larger printers often get incredibly expensive. There is like a common size of 20x20x15 to 25x25x20. However if you are skilled with hardware and willing to learn pretty much everything about RepRaps you may buy a cheap Chinese printer and improve it over and over again to fit your needs.
For learning how to design mechanical parts I loved “Designspark mechanical”. It is incredibly easy to do complex parts however it is lacking some small tools and in rare cases it may get buggy (save and restart helps).
A note about nylons, I am the kind of guy who got a set of parts about 4 years ago and exchanged it over and over again. So I also print trimmer line from weed Wacker. Nylon however may be incredibly frustrating to print. It tends to delamination and warp. Having a strong and stable heatbed and at its best a closed print chamber helps a lot. If printing with nylon successes it is superior strong and gives a nice surface.
The mold parts I make will be mostly flat ish and not too complex, nothing real high either, they just need to hold up to vacuum forming as part of larger wood molds. And haven’t found too much addressing that issue.
Pretty set on one of the 3 printers I mentioned above.
Thanks
Greg.
I am running next to other designs a homemade prusa i3. Did just Google for the printers you mentioned. The CR-10 uses aluminum profiles as chassis and drive carrier which I tried once before and it works superior in terms of acceleration and precision. The original Joseph prusa i3 printer in the other hand uses awesome high level features like matrix based z-probing and diagonal correction. Robo seems to print inside an enclosed chassis which is like a must have for very high temperature prints. Depending on your wallet I may suggest you one of the first two.
What are the required dimension? I guess I’m asking what scale rc cars are you making molds for? I’ve got 1/8 and 1/10… those are both too large for most printers. I’d build one out of extruded aluminum. My Big-E printer (4’x8’x6’) was scaled down by a robotics company who uses it to print huge parts for production… makes me want to design one for guys like you 
it would be about $500 in parts maybe less and around 2’x3’x1’ (xyz) for what you are doing.
Not making any promises, but I’ve been looking for an excuse to get the design out there
Anyone interested? Open source of course.
Brook
Hi thanks for the reply.
My form area is about 27x20. I do 1/10 and short course based dirt oval
cars. Mostly from wood and getting tired of the sawdust. I don’t need to
be able to print the whole thing. Even thinking of printing stuff 1/2”-2”
thick. Depending on the section and then glueing together over wood block.
Greg
That’s a pretty good plan, sectioning the mold and using a wood block. You might not need it. I’ll measure my rc truck to see what would work for a one-and-done print just for fun.
A tip bigger than .4mm would speed the process… not sure what resolution will come through in the mold. I sand and use body filler for similar projects.
Brook