Throughout the ages... ever since metal castings have been around, the lost-wax process has been virtually the only way to make investment cast parts... until now.

Fopat, a FOam PATtern material has been introduced...

FOPAT.com

Rapid prototyping ... has continued to grow at 10% to 40% per year over the past few years such that people are more and more talking about "rapid manufacturing" for production of industrial parts directly from CAD data.  While the old processes and material properties have been a road bump to mainstream acceptance, the new materials and properties available are growing quickly and showing promise...

Bob Dzugan, president of buyCASTINGS.com Inc. and current Chairman of the AFS 4L committee on Investment Casting, recently presented a paper entitled "Computer Simulation to Predict Wax Tooling Dimensions" at Investment Casting Institute's 54th annual  conference and Expo...