CNC brass engraving from an stl file

[Musht]

3D printing being a wide field ;-) If its very high detail would have though SLS or DMLS would offer the resolution possibly requiring intermediate steps to make a working mould, sure can get SLS baked to short run injection mould level.

Milling into wax or foam and then investment casting from there.

Spark erosion into hard steel for longer run moulds.

No way of getting round that it is a lot of hours on very expensive machines, once you have the moulds, small as they are ,raw material is going to be pence per shot.

Is this one of these artistic ambitions meeting the cold light of day moments though.

"If you only knew what it was for you'd bite my hand off at the chance to become a partner!"

Hay tomorrow, always tomorrow....

If its a sure fire winner, producing moulds goes from expensive to scary expensive , producing parts is cheap, someone will bite your hand off to put the money up to have the moulds die sunk, which would then give you a realistic budget to work from.

[Statstastic]

Musht, thanks for the info, I agree with everything you've said. Unfortunately the problem isn't the process, but the file format.

I've got a mould housing and IM company ready to go, the only thing I don't have are the inserts. There are loads of engraving companies from Hounslow to Hong Kong who can engrave the detail.....as long as they are in IGES/solid format. I've also found investment casting companies who are happy to do a quote, all I have to do is....send them an IGES file :-) Same goes for spark erosion, etc. You can convert mesh files (stl, obj, etc) to solid in a number of packages, but only if they are less than 20,000 faces. Unfortuntely mine are bigger than this limit and I can't find anything that will do it - would love to be told otherwise!
I'm intrigued by your suggestion to bake an sls. Is that something you can do with SLA as well? I'd need the resolution of SLA as SLS is too grainy for me.

As you say, there is the option of a multi stage approach involving SLA then casting them, but that may be out of my reach. I thought it would be worth exploring the possibility that someone with their own set up might be set up for stls, so here I am ;-)