Lost-foam casting

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Lost foam casting may be possible directly from 3d printed parts. Wikipedia describes the basic process well:

[1] Lost Foam Casting.

In typical styrofoam (extruded polystyrene foam), the polystyrene accounts for approximately 2% of the total volume of the foam. This is boiled off into the sand when the hot metal comes in contact with it.

Other experimenters have had good success milling blocks of styrofoam with CNC machine, and casting the results into metals such as aluminum or brass.

This author personally has unsuccessfully attempted a "lost foam" casting with an ABS printed model(~60% infill). I believe that the infill of the model must be kept very sparse ~10% for this method to be successful.

More experimentation needs to be performed with low infill PLA models.