[DanB]

Greets all,

I am currently exploring a concept, which may or may not be viable. My faculty gives an award named after a Medallion, but unfortunately the award as presented, is just a plaque with a metal etch of the medal in question. Today we were just brain storming a few ideas (such as 3D scanning the medal and printing a face to mount on the plaque, etc) and came up actually trying to Stamp a copy of one face of the medal in pewter or brass.

Then obviously we started to consider how we could do this – the idea here is to make a simple cast of the ‘heads’ face of the medal in some sort of epoxy, and use that to make a single impression in some material (probably just using a simple hydraulic press).

So is there such a resin that will produce a crisp ‘copy’ of the face, and then survive the sorts of pressures required to imprint on softer metals? It doesn’t need to be long lasting (say 2-3 presses – a test pressing, then two ‘chances’ at getting it right) as we’re only doing this once a year.

Is this a dead-end (meaning we go back and start to look at ‘borrowing’ 😉 a hi-res 3D scanner, and explore that path) or plausible?

Cheers all 🙂

Dan

[Katherine Swift]

Hi Dan,

This is a neat idea!

While you can get crisp details in resin (assuming your mold is made that way), I wouldn’t expect it to survive the pressure or heat of printing it into metal. If you wanted to try, a hard-curing polyurethane resin is what I would use.

If you try this, would you mind letting us know how it goes?

[Dan B]

Yeah, it is an interesting little experiment.

I know that there are resins that have significantly harder ‘hardnesses’ than say Pewter, but its that pressing pressure that I feel will be the issue.

The concept as is, into ‘collar’ the resin in a Steel Pipe, to help ‘hold things together’, in a attempt to keep the forces going through the resin in a single direction (instead of compression allowing the resin to expand sideways, under pressure).

Must look into some harder curing PU’s then! Any idea where to start?

Dan

[Katherine Swift]

You can try Alumilite or Smooth-on. They have several polyurethane resins.

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