Silicone is a useful material for many purposes. Traditionally, creating something out of silicone required injection molding. That’s not difficult, but it does require a good bit of setup. As [Formlabs] points out in a recent video, there are at least three other routes to create silicone parts that utilize 3D printing technology that might fit your application better, especially if you only need a few of a particular item. You can see the video below.
The three methods are either printing silicone directly, printing a mold, casting silicone, or using high-performance elastomers, which are very silicone-like. Of course, as you might expect, some of this is aimed at prompting some of [Formlab’s] products, like a new silicone resin, and you can’t blame them for that.
However, they also cover the basics of printing with elastomers that have similar properties to silicone but are both harder and less expensive. Again, they are talking about their resins, of course.
The video also looks at creating molds for liquid injection and compression molding with putty. There’s also an example of eggshell molds. Granted, if you find any of this interesting, you’ll have some more research to do, but just the wide range of examples and applications will probably give you some ideas.
One thing we didn’t see was how you can augment silicone parts with 3D-printed inserts. Of course, you don’t need 3D printing to make silicone items and molds. It just makes it easier.
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