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Old 07-18-2022, 08:13 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dlazarus6660
I was going to o recommend R/CGroups of which I'm a long time member.
There is a plans business from the UK that presents free plans of most model aircraft.
You download them on your thumb device and bring it to a printing place.
I'll try to find it.
Thank you. I don't think there are any such "foam fabrication firms" here in town (I'll look and ask around, just in case), but I'm sure there are ones online that make CNC-machined--or maybe 3D printed--molds for these kinds of EPO or EPP expanded foam items (including model gliders), and do the foam-molding as well. I have no idea how much it costs (or what the minimum numbers of units might be), but I'll find out! :-) In this connection:

When--in the early 1990s--I was looking to have BT-5 size (regular) injection-molded, low-pressure injection-molded, or rotationally-molded, styrene 5:1 tangent ogive nose cones made for my Nova Hobbies ASP scale kits (which had turned-balsa nose cones), the cheapest option I could find locally (in Miami, at that time) was a single-cavity, tool steel mold. It would have cost $5,000, which I couldn't afford (but it could have cast 100,000 or more styrene nose cones), but:

I told the company I simply couldn't afford the tool steel mold, and they recommended a shorter-life--but much cheaper (just a few hundred dollars) mold--made of a rather "soap-like" plastic (Delrin, I think; they said that plastic funnels and similar items are sometimes cast in these molds). They didn't make such molds themselves, but suggested other Miami plastic molders who did. Maybe, if the most common method is too expensive for me, there is an analog of the shorter-life molds, regarding expanded foam (EPO and/or EPP) molding.
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