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Please, dear God, don't anyone tell them about sand-casting...

Explanation for non-mechs: Make a shape out of wood with a chisel, push it into sand to make a void, melt Alu in a glorified BBQ, pour into sand to make a perfect replica of the wooden template. You can turn out 100 high quality "mechanical parts" in alloyed metal in the same time it takes to 3D print one in PLA.

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Again with the casting in this thread. What parts are you imagining you can make this way? Modern small arms generally require quite good tolerances. If you aren't going for that (which you clearly aren't because you chose casting lol), just buy a pipe and move on.

Unfortunately your knowledge of industrial manufacturing processes might not be as strong as you think it is. The immediate evidence to consider is that people cast their own Warhammer desktop war-gaming miniatures at home: The feature accuracy of these is much higher than the milling accuracy of cheap ARmalite knock-offs.

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