Patterns for Investment Casting

Increase your investment casting workflow efficiency for prototyping and production of metal components of any complexity and size with fast, economical, and highly accurate 3D printed patterns.

Up to 90%

cost reduction over conventional wax patterns

100%

tooling elimination

100%

fit into the investment casting process

Supporting Your Business Growth and Profitability with Industry Expertise

Investment casting is one of the world’s oldest manufacturing methods. Despite recent advances, it remains a manual process of pattern, mold, and casted part creation. Automation improvements in sprue assembly and shell building have streamlined mass production. Yet the requirement for tooling to deliver casting patterns is a barrier to fast part delivery and innovation. Digital processes and new investment casting technologies are poised to deliver massive time and cost savings. Workflows that took weeks can now be done in hours.

From the testing and iteration stages to the end-use metal components production, 3D Systems has developed advanced 3D printing solutions for scalable production of 100% wax or castable plastic patterns. These solutions offer a profitable way for foundries to achieve production-grade casted parts faster and more affordably than ever before, and to become increasingly responsive to customer requirements. 3D Systems’ digital foundry solutions eliminate the need for tooling to bring new agility and cost-effectiveness to investment casting pattern production and enable higher performing, more complex parts for casting in production volumes.

Addressing Investment Casting Patterns Manufacturing with 3D Printing

Rapid Order Fulfillment

Meeting demand and quality standards requires fast design iteration, customization, updates, and adjustments on the fly, as well as the capability to deliver expected volume production batches. Foundries highly responsive to customer demand will get the new contracts. 3D Systems solutions deliver cost-effective, high-quality 3D printed patterns with quick turnaround and high throughput at factory scale.

Design Complexity and Flexibility

The layer-by-layer build of 3D printed casting patterns means foundries can quickly and inexpensively deliver what were previously impossible or difficult to produce geometries. The combination of topology optimization, light weighting or assembly consolidation strategies with additive manufacturing of casting patterns means digital foundries can address the most challenging customer demand.

High Quality Castings

Variabilities in investment casting quality are caused by many factors, all of which can affect surface quality and accuracy. Our 3D printing solutions for investment casting produce high-fidelity and smooth surface finish patterns that are fully compatible with your processes. These result in accurate and high-quality metal castings with complete, ash-free pattern burn out.

Reduced Costs

Beyond eliminating tooling need, costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and requiring storage space, reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, minimized waste with high material efficiency, end-to-end 3D printing solutions, and reduced finishing with smooth pattern surfaces contribute to reduced cost per part.

Customer Stories

The Digital Foundry in Action at Invest cast with the ProJet MJP 2500 IC 3D printer

Invest Cast is making the foundry digital with 3D Systems' ProJet 2500 IC with RealWax materials for production-grade investment casting patterns that can deliver CAD to finished casted parts in 24 hours.

Watch the Video
Vaupell Saves Time and Money on Investment Casting with 3D Systems

Vaupell is using QuickCast^®, the stereolithography (SLA) process developed by 3D Systems for investment casting, to deliver unprecedented speed and quality to its customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional methodologies.

Read the Customer Story

Watch the Video
Comparing Cost and Quality of a Complex Impeller Casting Made from 3D Printed SLA QuickCast Patterns

Tech Cast delivers results of comparing 3D printed SLA casting patterns with traditional casting patterns through to final production

Read the Customer Story
Foundry Saves Time, Advances Wax Pattern Aesthetics with Wax 3D Printing

Since its purchase of 3D Systems ProJet^® MJP 2500 IC wax 3D printer, Microfound has increased its overall competitiveness and accelerated its ability to produce high quality prototypes and pre-production series wax patterns.

3D Printing Solutions for Your Investment Casting Workflow

100% Wax Patterns in Hours Without Tooling

Developed for the investment casting professional, our wax MultiJet 3D printing solution produces small to mid-size 100% wax patterns at a significantly lower cost and in less time than traditional pattern production for low to medium-volume jobs. Delivering quality, accuracy and repeatability, it generates wax patterns that drop seamlessly into existing investment casting processes, with the same melt and burn-out characteristics of standard casting waxes. This solution is ideal for customized metal components, bridge manufacturing and low volume production.

High Quality, Lightweight Plastic Patterns in Hours

The QuickCast® build style is an SLA print methodology developed by 3D Systems to answer a pressing need for the investment casting industry. This highly productive solution offers all the benefits of legendary stereolithography for investment casting applications: smooth surfaces, high quality and resolution for complex geometries and exceptional accuracy. It creates small to extra-large lightweight, yet strong, castable plastic patterns that burn out with virtually no ash residue. 3D Systems’ castable resins are also available in antimony-free varieties, enabling more reactive metals like Titanium to be cast.

From Micro to Macro

Our 3D printers are able to produce finely detailed, high-resolution patterns in sizes ranging from just a few millimeters, all the way up to 1.5 meters long in one piece, minimizing the amount of assembly for larger patterns—all at the same exceptional resolution and accuracy, with virtually no part shrinkage or warping. Further, 3D Systems has seamless workflows for parts that exceed the build volume, guiding users through the sectioning and post-print joining steps needed to produce a perfect pattern, whatever its size.

Applications Consulting

Through our Application Innovation Group, we leverage years of investment casting and additive manufacturing expertise to help find optimized solutions for your applications. We help foundries establish their own 3D printing capabilities that reduce costs and ramp times. Through hands-on training and consultation—and the transfer of prequalified manufacturing processes to your site—our dedicated team works with you across every step, from pre-production to full-scale volume production.

Learn More About our Solutions for Investment Casting

Resources

Investment casting Solutions Brochure

3D Systems’ tool-less digital manufacturing solutions have changed the landscape of investment casting with 3D printing of high quality wax and resin casting patterns in hours that allow high complexity metal part production at significantly lower costs.

Download the Investment Casting Brochure
The Benefits of Investment Casting with SLA

Discover how stereolithography (SLA) investment casting patterns fit seamlessly into foundry workflows and are advancing casting applications in aerospace, automotive, and more. Companies like Vaupell are using QuickCast to dramatically reduce the time and cost of investment casting patterns.

Watch the Webinar
Summary- QuickCast Diamond - New Internal Smart Support Structures

Get an overview of how the 3D Systems master pattern solution with QuickCast Diamond build style produces master patterns that are up to 30% lighter and have even more consistent strength than previous QuickCast build styles. For even lighter patterns and improved economics.

3D Systems QuickCast Diamond Flyer
6 Reasons to Adopt 3D Printed Patterns in your Investment Casting Process

With easy-to-use 3D printing technologies and materials from 3D Systems, investment casting patterns that drop seamlessly into existing metal casting processes deliver untold productivity benefits for foundries. Relying less on expensive tooling and more on rapid production of casting patterns to meet customer needs, it also enables more complex digital designs to be manufactured.

Download the Infographic