I hope nobody wears solid orange shoes, these are an exception though, because they are 3D printed in wax. As you can imagine, these are not life size shoes, they are replacement feet for your typical Ken and Barbie dolls, complete with shoelaces! This highly detailed 3D printed wax gives you the ability to make real solid products, by using wax loss process.

Usually, we show only the final product, but in this case, I thought it will be a good idea to give users our process to provide more insight and good ideas to make our products even better. This particular set of shoes will be make to cast into metal, with the exact same details. Although less common, the same procedure can be done to make a mold for plastic, so we can actually use thermoplastic in place of metal for the final product, this includes PVC, ABS, or Vinyl.

The process simple, but messy, a master mold is created using plaster, to any quantity you desire, a wax based master will be wrapped around in this plaster and when dry, it will be baked at high temperature to vaporize the wax and dry the plaster. Then, either metal (Aluminum, Magnesium, or Copper alloys), or thermoplastics can be molten and poured into the holes where the wax is vaporized, filling the now empty cavity with your desired material. The mold is then broken, and the parts moved for cleaning and shipment. We use this process because it can produce a fairly high volume with these special metals or plastics, at very high quality, and very low cost. Of course, the master mold is what the quality is based on, so here’s some examples of these high quality masters, thanks to the wonders of 3D printing.