Make Money 3D Printing Molds (and ZERO Experience)

How to Actually Monetize Your 3D Printer if you would like to make custom molds using your 3D printer for candles and then perhaps even sell them without ever having to touch designing here's a simple guide how to get the best mods possible and I even went ahead and I created a few candles myself so that I would know what I'm talking about a big part of the 3D printing community is trying to figure out a way how to monetize 3D printing and I think printing just more dust collectors such as Flexes doesn't really help the situation and so I think this is a great replacement because you don't even need to be making the candles themselves you can just create the mold and you won't even be needing to do any of the designing of the mold itself so let me show you how to do it and because I tried it myself I failed a lot so now I can actually tell you what I Learned so that you can see my mistakes and avoid them the most important part is the creation of the mold Introducing Meshcast: The Ultimate 2-Part Mold Box Tool itself and how do you do it without modeling and that's what I wanna show you it's a tool called meshcast and over there you can create a lot of different forms for different types of things and the tool that we will be using is the 2 part mold box which is meant for candles it's actually super simple and that's why I like it so much all you do is you upload your STL there you decide where you want to have the hole you orient your model and then you just save for it to generate the mold and after a few seconds after it calculates how the mold would fit the best you can download the mold itself and that's all you need to do and you have the mold ready to print Where to Find 3D Models & AI Generators and that's all amazing but how do we get the model itself well there are two main ways how to do it the first one is that you can find a model on the internet that you can download and the second one is that you can design it yourself but that would of course require cat knowledge so I won't go into that today but today we have so many platforms where there are models for free or even AI generators that can help you generate the model or the shape that you want so I think it shouldn't be a problem getting the model itself but what could be a problem is getting the appropriate model for candle making so once you start getting the models Rule 1: Always Use Simple, Round Shapes (Avoid Sharp Edges!) here are a few rules that if you follow the mould will come out perfectly the most important is that you should aim for round shapes because round shapes come out of the mould much better than anything with sharp corners which is a mistake that I made when I was trying to do something with a text and I forgot to fill it the text itself so if you can try to avoid sharp edges as much as you can because they come out of the mould much harder and they will usually stick in there and as you can see that's exactly the reason that my letters didn't come out of the mold as they should so if you use round shapes I promise you that the mold will be 1,000 times better and it will be easier to use it Rule 2: Watch Out for Trapped Geometry and the second mistake that I made and you can learn from is that you never want to have walls that would be in the way of pulling the model out of the mould itself which is a mistake that I did when I was trying to do the anger character from inside out and as you can see a big part of the candle itself stayed in the mold and so what I would recommend and even gave me the best results for the candles themselves is to keep it as simple as possible because not only then you get a much better experience with using the mold but even the candle itself looks a lot better try to aim for simple and round shapes and then you will be perfectly fine of course if you have a bit more DIY experience you will be probably able to do even harder shapes unfortunately that wasn't me so I'm just recommending what worked for me The Beginner Candle Making Process & Kit now the candle making process is so easy that even a beginner like me was able to pull it off and I was using this 7 dollar candle making kit from Lidl and that's basically it but I have a few recommendations that even if you are selling it you can recommend to the person using the mold to use it as well I won't be going into the specifics of making the candles themselves in this video exactly I'm gonna be focusing more on the 3D printing side but it's really good to know what does it feel like to even make the candles themselves so that then when you are making the molds you can make them for the person that that's gonna be using the mold to have it the easiest as possible as it can Why PETG is Way Better Than PLA for Wax Molds big recommendation from me is to use PETG for the material of printing the mold themselves because PETG has naturally higher level of melting temperature so it will be much better than PLA because if you pour boiling hot wax into the mold that's made from PLA it will start melting from the inside a bit I tried the PLA mold but to make sure that it actually stays intact I had to wait a bit for the VAX to cool down to a temperature where it won't melt the PLA from the inside out so PETG is generally better and second Slicer Secrets: Variable Layer Height & Wall Thickness because you will be printing it flat and you probably will have the most detail exactly on the bottom of the mold and then the walls themselves won't need that much detail you can actually very confidently hear use the variable layer height which will give you the highest quality and the resolution of the candles themselves and at the same time it will probably speed up your print quite a bit but I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to save material on the molds themselves because if you make the walls for example too low the wax then could go through the walls and it wouldn't end well Pro-Tip: Adding Value with Candle Aromas and a tip that will really advance the candle making that you can either give to somebody who you're selling the mould to or even if you are doing the candles yourself is to use some kind of aroma in the candles because then when somebody lights them up they will actually start lighting the whole room with that smell which I think is an amazing upgrade because you automatically give the candle a bit higher value and a lot of the people that are using the candles like to have them smell nice How to Sell: Creating the Perfect Product Bundle and if you are purely aiming at selling the molds I would highly recommend making a bundle where not only do you sell the mold but you even sell the kit to make the candles themselves because then the people who are buying it don't need to buy the candle making kit themselves so if you aren't selling this to already people who know how to make candles and have all the gear needed this is a really good advancement that you could then use to make the product Scaling the Business Beyond Just Candles & Outro even better and this whole mold making process doesn't need to be applied just to candles because mesh cast has a lot more tools to use you can apply this with many more tools and then just start selling these molds find the people that you want to sell it to or even the product that you make with the molds and then sell it to them and since there are so many DIY businesses around the whole world who all desire customization I think this is a perfect business to currently get into if you have a 3D printer you won't be needing to do any of the manual labor yourself just stay within selling the 3D prints and if you use some of my tips you can even sell it as a bundle and so definitely check out all of the other tools on meshmixer that are there available and if you would like me to make a video on something related to this definitely drop it in the comments and I hope this helps