Hi All,

I'm new to the forum and had a question about the qulaity that should be expected form lost wx casting for a professional casting company.

I have been working with a 3D designer who has produced some amazing designs for me, which I shared with the casting house to check that they didn't have any concerns about casting issues. I then has this design 3D printed in wax and sent to the casting house, which cost a few hundred pounds as it was a fairly large piece.

The casting house explained to me that they'd prefer me to finish the master, rather than them doing it. Which makes sense I guess, but I would have preferred them to do this based on detailed renderrings I shared. Is this normal?

They let me know when they received the wax and send me the unfinished casting of the master pretty quickly, however the quality was no-where near what I was expecting.

For the most part, the details has been captured very well and everything looked good, but they are numerous holes in the piece and patches. Some of them are small and on surfaces that will be polished flat, others are quite large and on areas of detail. Someone suggested that I melt wax into the holes and try to redo the details, but there are quiter a few holes and this isn't my speciality.

I was just wondering if my expectations were too high. I thought that the casting would be a perfect replica of the wax. If you use casting companies, what are your expectations whenyou send them a high value wax? I am honestly quite dissapointed, but don't want to come accross as unreasonable, so was hoping for some insight from anyone with more experience of this process.

If the wax was likely to have casting issues, I would have rather had a mould made of the wax as a backup, to avoid a lengthy repair or paying for a reprint. Is this a common approach?

I look forward to hearing your opinions.

Cheers,
Steve