It’s no surprise that people love working with this material. It has many advantages over wood, plastic and metal when making detailed parts for prototyping and mould making. Made from a mixture of paraffin wax and plastic it has no grain at all, which results in an excellent surface finish and dimensional accuracy. It can also be used for lost wax casting.
Faster
It machines faster than polyurethane and epoxy tooling boards. You also don’t need a release agent when using it as a mould, so it’s easy to cast liquid tooling plastics like epoxy, urethane and silicone.
Safer
Machining wax is easy on the machine. It can be carved at high speed with no risk of breaking the cutting tool. It doesn’t produce sharp chips or hazardous dust, so it doesn’t damage me or the machine.
It’s also non-abrasive and self-lubricating so it doesn’t wear down the tool. Unlike metal, this means that no cutting fluid is needed, so you get an unobstructed view.
Reusable
Discarded parts and test pieces can be easily reused by remelting and recasting them into new blocks. Try doing that with wood. The wax has a high melting point, so it won’t melt as it’s being cut and it doesn’t stick to the cutting tool. Instead it forms nice chips which can be collected and reused.
It’s made by melting paraffin wax with recycled HDPE or LDPE plastic. The process is pretty dangerous because the molten goop doesn’t appear to be particularly hot – it doesn’t bubble like boiling water – yet the temperature is actually more like 200ºC. To make matters worse, it would stick to your skin while it’s burning you. Gloves and no sudden movements.
Colour is added by dropping in a wax crayon. I love this fact on so many levels.