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I had the same thought recently. Shapeways offers parts printed in wax for casting. I question the value, though, as shipping may well warp waxy materials. There are also others selling materials intended specifically for lost investment casting. Still others thought to see whether PLA could be used directly for lost investment casting with good results. The author at the second link used foam strips, presumably because it's cheap and fast, which 3d printing generally isn't.

Now you have a reason to get a 3D Printer.

And make a home furnace as well...

There are lots of people doing casting from 3D prints. You can 3D print the master in PLA, then make a plaster cast, burn out the PLA, and pour in metal. For example, http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ . It works, it's just more dangerous and complex than most people want to deal with.

One can instead print the parts @102% (or so) and do lost wax casting in aluminum for production oneself:

http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/

PLA, a plastic often used in hobbyist 3D printers, can be burnt out for casting too.

What's holding back 3-D printing is that it's only good for making plastic crap.

Doing something useful, like replicating a new carburetor for my 30-year-old roto-tiller, is more difficult and more expensive.

It'll take a bit more work then just pressing print and walking a way. But it can be done: Lost PLA Casting [Another Source]

What's really holding back 3D-Printing is people assuming something is holding back 3D-Printing.

You can use the lost wax method on 3d printed PLA parts already.

So your point is..because paper documents have gone out of fashion...all physical objects are also useless? Or do you think paper printers aren't cheap and ubiquitous ? I built a 3D printer, and I don't print toys/models.

I broke a wheel on my dishwasher? I just drew one up and printed it, good as new. I broke a handle on my fileting knife..I printed one nicer than the original which has a fish gut scooper on the handle. I've printed brackets for my truck, pieces for the printer itself, and if I got really enterprising, I could use the printed plastic to make a lost-plastic casting and cast myself metal versions of anything I wanted. (See here: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ )

My printer was under a thousand start to finish but that was self built so a lot more work than something you just unbox. (Mendelmax 2.0 from makerstoolworks.com if anyone cares(no affil))

Anyways, does it make pure financial sense? Maybe, maybe not. Does the ability to make any physical object that fits within my printers dimensions within a few minutes or hours make it worth it for me? Definitely. Some things take weeks when you need them now, sometimes you need to try 10 versions of something before it would make sense to pay for a final high quality one to be made. Sometimes its an object not important enough to spend the time and money on if you need to send away for it, but it would be neat to have. There are a million reasons I think 3D printers can work for the average Joe and see regular use.

I do 3D printing and talk a lot to the designers of the big printers. As mentioned above, you definitely don't want Blender, or any of those other surface modelling apps. They WILL work, but tend to suck for dimensional accuracy, and you can create weird crap that cant actually exist.

I think if money is no object, Solidworks is by far the easiest and most powerful thing you can jump into, with tons of resources on the net. If you can afford the price tag or are going to pirate it anyways, Solidworks is great.

The mendelmax series of printers is designed by maxbots. He personally uses Alibre. He says it does a lot of what solidworks does, and with some caveats, thinks that for the 99$ it is a great tool and all you'll ever need for basic 3D modelling. Depending on your patent stance, 3D systems owns a shit ton of patents on 3d printing in general and they don't hesitate to use them to close down infringing competitors. This may sour you.

If you want a fairly nice option that is getting nicer every day, FreeCAD is obviously free, open source, and is a fairly nice tool. Obviously no Solidworks, but the price is right!

And the last but certainly not least is OpenSCAD. You write your 3D models like programs, and it will render them. This allows some very cool time saving things, but it is obviously a bit less visual, so it depends on how you think, design, etc, and what your background is. Many of the things you will make in OpenSCAD will end up being parametric as well, making resizing and changing things somewhat easier. That being said any of the above tools can create parametric designs.

Anyways good luck, I love 3d printing, and would love to get a mill some day! Or maybe just start casting my prints using the lost PLA method: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/

Have fun!

The main point of casting from a 3D print is to change the material from being "3D printed plastic" to being any other flowable thing: metal, urethane, transparent resin epoxy, silicone, plaster of paris, etc. What your 3D printer is bringing to the table is the shape. So the key feature you're looking for, if you want to do molding and casting, is getting the right shape out. Material strength is relatively unimportant.

ABS has an impressive material strength, but if you're planning on casting, you should look into PLA printing instead. PLA's material strength sucks compared to ABS, but man is it easier to make good prints with it! You can get better resolution on it -- PLA at 0.1mm vs ABS at 0.2mm -- and the warping and curling issues are greatly reduced. It's a lot more reliable to work with.

The other big reason to use PLA is that it dissolves away in boiling water. Stick your PLA mold and whatever you casted into it into a crock pot for a day, and the PLA's gone.

Any 3D printer that can print ABS can also print PLA. Check out the MakerGear M2: Metal frame, way cheaper than a Makerbot, and it beat the Makerbot and several other contenders in Make Magazine's 3D printer roundup recently. Good accuracy, speed, and print quality. Good business ethics too (Makerbot's not so popular around here these days since they suddenly changed to closed source.)

As a note, if you're truly obsessed with getting the right shape, you should be looking at milling machines, not 3D printers. Milling machines go down to more like 0.001mm resolution. The process is detailed here.

Last, this is an awesome set of pictures showing lost PLA casting (plaster of paris -> metal)

Any printer that uses G-code can use Slic3r to slice up meshes for it. Slic3r has a number of different infill patterns, and I'll admit the honeycomb one is the neatest by far. It does slow the print down a bit compared to rectilinear though, but it's good if you want quality rather than speed.

People have built Repraps that can do the same thing for $300. The lowest one was $250 or so, I think. Of course, they require self-sourcing and a bit of skill with various tools like soldering irons, screwdrivers and the Arduino IDE. Not ideal for the general consumer.

ABS has not been tried for lost-wax methods, afaik, but PLA (another material often used interchangably, lower melting point and more eco-friendly) has been used to cast aluminum. http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/