DIGITAL WAXWORKS
3D printed waxes ready for ceramic investment for lost wax casting.
Concept Realizations designs and supplies foundries and sculptors with 3D printed waxes complete with vents, window cuts, integral sprues, gating, and funnels, ready for ceramic investment.
Our digital-to-bronze workflow allows sculptors to skip the expensive production of physical maquettes and enlargements, and allows foundries to skip the costly and time-consuming mold-making and wax-casting processes. The rough concept, final design work, and the entire mold-making and waxworks stages are done digitally.
Projects typically start one of two ways. We either produce a digital model from scratch, based on our customers’ design drawings, sketches, reference photos, and style direction—even a conversation is enough to get the ball rolling on the design. We can also 3D scan our customers’ maquettes, and digitally enlarge, edit, and refine them as needed.
Whether it has been 3D scanned or designed entirely onscreen, after the underlying digital model is complete, we digitally cut it into castable-sized pieces. We put interlocking joints in ideal locations, and cut window openings where needed. (See this full-figure bronze example of a segmented design.) Sprues can be integrated into the digital design, arranged, curved, and oriented according to the foundry’s preferences. We are able to design internal features such as vents, interior sprues, flanges, and internally interlocking details that would be impossible with conventional wax casting. We design a perfectly uniform—or variable—wall thickness directly into the digital design, setting the foundry up for a clean burnout and perfect pour.
The completed digital model is 3D printed in a clean-burning, wax-like 3D print media. The foundry then takes our 3D prints directly into ceramic investment in an otherwise conventional lost-wax casting process.
This direct digital-to-bronze workflow can be a big advantage for complex designs, and for projects that require only a few castings, or an accelerated schedule.
Digital-to-bronze workflow: a series of five bronze casts of primate hands for installation at the Smithsonian National Zoo.
