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I am looking to build my own spin casting machine and start to produce some miniatures no longer available for personal use and looking for some help getting started. I found this tutuorial I put below and looking at it, i can make this from easily attainable scrap and an affordable electric motor. The mold rubber is relatively cheap and something that I can easily do at home. Does anyone have any experiance doing this and keeping things inexpensive.

http://www.granthams.com/Spincast/

and this guy makes making the molds look easy as can be.

1) Just because it is personal use...doesn't necessarily allow for making your own copies (especially in the US).

2) Just because they are no longer available...doesn't really justify making your own copies (especially since sources like eBay make the vast majority of OOP products readily attainable).

3) You don't want information from someone who is experienced with spin casting...you want information from someone who has made their own machines.

Provided you have the ability and the access to the tools needed - you can put together a machine for...between free and a few hundred dollars depending on what materials you have on hand or can scrounge up. If you don't have the ability or access to the tools needed - costs will add up depending on how much you need to pay other people to do.

At a bare minimum - you need to be able to cut aluminum or other stable materials in a way that can be nearly perfectly balanced while spinning at a pretty descent clip. I have a commercial machine as well as a second which I built myself - and on the second one I used plate steel for mold turntable in order to avoid certain balance issues with lighter materials. You will need a motor that can handle a fair amount of torque - variable speed and reversible are handy too. Some people like to scrounge a wash machine/dryer motor for that - I am now using a Leeson with a controller. You will need some sort of clamp mechanism to hold the mold in place while spinning - the simplest is a plate the is attached to the turntable mechanically...more complex involve a freely rotating plate that can be lowered down onto the mold on the turntable (allows for front loading and faster access to the mold). Quality bearings that can deal with the heat... A box of some form to safely house the mess...

You will also need a smelting pot to melt your metal - variable temperature ideally so that you can use different alloys as needed. I recommend a fume extraction system of sorts...melting white metals has the potential to release all sorts of nastiness into the air. If you can't provide the air handler...make sure you do your work in a very well ventilated area, like a garage with the door open and another door/window open for cross air flow.

Without paying anyone to do any work - and having a fair amount of the needed material on hand already - I probably have $1500-2000 in my DIY machine. I think I spent $1000 on my commercial machine. I have redesigned it 4 times in the process though and went from almost entirely scrounged parts (wanted a new controller/emergency shutoff switch that cost me $50 as well as some bearings that cost another $25). It currently does the job of a machine that probably would retail for $7500 though (at least that is the one I based many of the modifications to it on).

I am currently looking at a 5th revision of it to add heated plates for the mold to cook off resin faster, as I find I am doing more and more spin cast resin now too...though I might leave this build alone and build another from scratch entirely.

Much beyond that...ummm...no. There is a lot of information available online already. It isn't difficult to find (in fact Zombiesmith has gone into great detail on his equipment). However, you are dealing with spinning parts...molten metal...and a litigious society.

If you want to recast some stuff for personal use, why not use resin instead of metal?

I know quite a few people who have done that in resin, though most just for experimentation or out of curiosity.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the primary advantage of a spin cast mold the ability to pump out more product and have a mold that is very durable (so that it can do more batches)? And, isn't it so that each mold is quite expensive to make? I know that at work, we pay for molds to be made for plastic products, and the price is definitely not cheap.

Best of luck with it, but I'm afraid we cannot have threads that basically just help people break IP laws on Dakka.