How to Make Custom Chocolate Molds using Pressure Forming…

Paul A. Young is an award-winning Chocolatier who champions craft and cutting edge creativity to create unique chocolate products. He and his team make all their creations completely by hand, in small batches, using fresh ingredients and unique molds.

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We teamed up with him to bring a memory from a trip back to life, reimagining the Cetonia aurata beetle into a colourful and delicious bonbon using our new Mayku Multiplier, desktop pressure forming machine.

Overcoming creative challenges for custom chocolate mold design

3D modelling software was the chosen design tool as gathering feedback and quickly implementing it into design iterations was essential. The template development process consisted of two main phases: design iteration and template testing. Templates are the shapes we use to create a master shape to form around in the Mayku Multiplier.

Dozens of different iterations of the design were made, testing mold usability features, surface textures, shape variations and sizes.

An embedded manufacturing process saves time and money with chocolate mold manufacturing

Chocolate molds need to have a smooth surface texture in order to offer the best user experience and a glossy finished texture. For this reason, the templates were manufactured with a desktop resin 3D printer, as it offers great surface quality, a reduced print time and less post-processing.

A Formlabs Form 3 and standard resin were used for this project, and a wide range of layer thicknesses was tested, ranging from 160 microns for early prototypes to 50 microns for the final design.

Mold making using 3D printing and a desktop pressure former

Once the template design is fully tested, production of the final design can start. For this project we went for a 10-piece mold, so only a limited amount of templates had to be made as they can be reused multiple times.

A custom rectangular shape was also 3D printed to create molds that matched in size with the ones that Paul A Young already had, helping him keep the creative space clean.

The molds were made using our Clear Sheets (PETG) as the transparency allows us to see the result before the bonbons are de-molded. Also, with the Multiplier you always make the exact number of molds needed. You don’t have to worry about minimum order quantities or over purchasing a mold. Make what you need, when you want to.

Watch the Mayku Multiplier product video on YouTube to learn more

How to use pressure formed molds for custom chocolate design

Once the molds are made, they are instantly ready to cast into, there is no waiting time like with outsourcing production or silicone mold manufacturing.

Chocolatier, Paul A. Young filled the beetle molds with tempered chocolate, removing the excess to create fillable chocolate beetle shells. A white chocolate ganache, coloured red was added for a dramatic cross-section and as a base for additional ingredients. The chocolates are then capped, scraped and left to harden.

Once set, the beetle chocolates are ready to de-mold with a simple tap. Correctly tempered chocolate will shrink as it sets, meaning that de-molding is straightforward and fast. Ensure you design templates with minimum undercuts for a Clear Sheets mold that works well and can easily be reused.

How to save time and money with custom molds using pressure forming

Creating custom chocolates for a customer takes a lot of time and resources. Traditional mold-making services are slow and have a high cost, reducing the profit margin and offering a suboptimal experience to the customer.

While traditional chocolate mold making services take weeks to make molds you don’t even have the chance to test, the Mayku Multiplier allows you to make them in days, controlling the creative process and allowing you to make changes quickly.

Forget about emails going back and forth with the mold manufacturer - that only increases the production costs of a single mold.

With the Mayku Multiplier, you can become your own mold manufacturer and won’t need to worry about minimum order quantities anymore.
 

How to buy the Mayku Multiplier

Our certified resellers have invaluable knowledge of applications and workflows, which will help you seamlessly integrate the Multiplier into your workshop. You can find your local reseller here.

3d print the positive and seal with an epoxy resin. Then make the negative using food safe silicone. I tried using 3d printed abs as a test run for personal use. Cleaning it was a nightmare and heating and cooling warped it. Not to mention the potential bacteria growth in-between poolry sealed layers. It's much easier, faster and more reliable to print a positive, have a low infil and then do what I said. If you have a very soft silicone it's even better since you can get away with having a single piece mould rather than a two piece. The key is % in the prep of the positive. If you rush it or use the wrong resin to seal it you end up with the lines transfering into your moulds and then chocolate.

By sealing I mean sealing the ridges of each layer. Anotjer option I've explored is vacum forming using APET Plastic. It's food grade and usually comes around 5mm thick so it's dead durable. But it's expensive and requires a beefy vac former.

If you are looking for more details, kindly visit Huafeng Mold.

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the standard nozzle from most printers will print PETG. The temps are lower than that of ABS, and the only restriction to printing ABS based on printer is a lack of heated bed. 

Polycarbonate, in contrast, requires an upgraded hotend to allow for 300C+ temps. The e3d v6 all metal hotends are capable of this, and ship with a proper thermistor that will accurately read higher than 300C.

Most other non-upgraded hotends are limited to the thermistor's capabilities. A cheap i3 clone kit can easly do 260-270C.

Some kits to look at to get started with tinkering; Anet A8 and Prussa i3 Mk2.  The A8 is a clone kit built in China, can usually find it around $170-$200 USD Sometimes cheaper.  Prusa i3 is the original designer and uses higher quality parts and provides a warranty as well as support but sells for $699. The A8 can be upgraded bit by bit to be better, such as having an e3d v6 hotend.

If you're more adventurous, you can try and build a clone yourself. A video guide of doing just that is located here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVWLpvekby0&t=42s

There's 6 parts to the series, and the build videos avg about 2-3 hours each.

updated by @timwilde: 04/03/17 13:57:52

We created a similar process. We designed our bars using Adobe Illustrator and created 3D models using Sketchup . We printed the bar "positives" using a budget 3D printer set to its finest resolution settings.

We bought some plans online to build a vacuum form machine. The plans were great and offered many options for customization.

Once we got the machine up and running we had to source some plastic. We purchased some PETG and Polycarbonate. The polycarbonate would be great but have found that it requires much too high of temps (like @timwilde mentioned) and melts our 3D printed molds after a single pull.

PETG is working great for now. It creates very detailed molds that have stood up well.

I've attached some pics of the process as well as an image of the final bars. Note that these pics were from pretty early on in the process. Since then we added a frame for rigidity and reprinted the "positives" a few times as we tweaked the design.

Would love to hear any feedback or answer any questions as we have learned so much from this great community.

Very nice!!  I originally thought that I would need to do vacuum molding to do any custom work. 3d printers, at the time, only had ABS or PLA as printable filaments.  In the last 2 years though, that's dramatically changed; PETG, Polycarbonate, Nylon, as well different alloys of PLA and ABS.  As soon as I saw PETG and Polycarbonate available, I thought I'd look into skipping the intermediary step of printing the positives and doing the forming.

BTW: The primary reason I thought it would be more expensive is that the vacuum is limited by strength; you can diy almost all of it. But to get good plastics and reusable molds out of the deal, you end up going super thin or different materials that are more brittle. Polycarbonate, as an example, has an extremely high melting temperature.

I'll keep posting here. As of right now I'm fairly confident in my printing skills, however, I'm building up a higher quality printer. I still need a few pieces before I can appropriately test a good PC or PETG mold.

As for resolution; nozzles are available as small as 0.15mm  Resolution for movement is usually in the 0.05mm range.  Frankly, much smaller than that and you start having surface tension and viscosity issues with chocolate. Between a dremel engraving kit to polish up the surface and different vapor polishes i'm fairly confident that I'll have something quite usable.

I'm also expecting to go full custom, but still have to learn the software so I can start charging for that setup. 

Well, the FDA came back with an answer.  The first answer was kinda bunk, gave me an application for a new Contact Surface.

However, I asked them more directly and got a response back.  Essentially if the printer itself and the materials can be safe, it is ok with the FDA. The onus is on the manufacturer (you in this case) to follow FDA guidelines for food safety.

PETG is a filament that is now regularly available. I would imagine research would be needed to find out if the colors are food safe, but clear/natural PETG would be recommended.  PETG can be sterilized by going through the dishwasher and withstands high heat.

Polycarbonate is another filament that is considered to be an exotic filament at the moment. It's available but more expensive than PETG and it's only available from some companies.  PC can be sterilized through dishwashing procedures and it can withstand high heat.

Printer extruders and hot ends can be made out of stainless steel or printed via PC or PETG for food contact safety.

This all being said, 3d printers arent exactly user friendly and you would still need to learn CAD or 3d modeling of some sort to do this completely DIY.  Luckily for me, that's my background. I was just wondering if there are others attempting this and how it's working out for you.   I just ordered my first 3d printer and expect to have a foodsafe printer capable of printing in Polycarbonate sometime over the summer.

I'm kind of excited that these breakthroughs have been made and that it seems that a reasonable cost for custom chocolate molds.  The designs also dont have to be awkward to handle because there's no need for injection molding support and structure in the mold.  This can make the mold smaller or be able to support more cavities than is usually available in a given commercial mold.

Hello everyone!  I'm sure this has been discussed but cant find anything recent. But I'm looking for a cost effective way to get a custom mold done and as I've been researching I found quite a few ways that I'd like some choco-life feedback and opinions on.

There's 2 ways I will ultimately go about this so this is getting done, but looking for safest and most cost effective way to do this.

3D printing.  It's come a LONG way since I started researching this several years ago. In the past couple years filament materials have kind of exploded - to the point it's nearly impossible to keep track of all the available materials. It's no longer a matter of PLA or ABS if you too havent looked at this in a while.

In the last year, a few companies have produced an FDA Approved Food Safe filament. There are a few companies making stuff with PET-G (water and soda bottle materials, lesser extent hobby grade mold sheets) and Polycarbonate.  But only a few have gone that extra step to get FDA Approval and it's stamped on the spool.  

So, has anyone contemplated any of this, looked any further on the aspects of 3d printing custom molds?  

I should note, that 3d printers have stepped up in quality, they still dont have super fine resolution without going the route of say, Shapeways, with the multi tens of thousands of dollar machines.  However, that should not stop you from finishing any mold that comes out. Sanding, polishing, engraving fine details, sealing (if necessary)

Doing things this way, if you already have the printer, it should only cost approx $10-$20/mold depending on mold size and who you source your filaments from.

I do have a line into the FDA to confirm that this is food safe and possible. The big question on hand is if it's a sterilizable finished piece. Polycarbonate does require much hotter temps to print though, so any bacteria on the filament is likely to be destroyed.  Proper finishing should provide a food contact surface that is sterilizable though.

So while I'm waiting I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter.

The other, much more expensive option is to 3d print a "positive".  Well, I guess in mold making terms they'd ultimately be negatives. But you'd design the bar/tablet/bonbon the exact way that you want it to look. You then print that out in whatever plastic is your choice.  Then you spend extra time getting that finished/post processed to look as perfect as you can get it.  Then you use that as a negative and pour a silicone mold of the printed piece.

With the mold materials that I've seen and researched, this is entirely food safe and sterilizable and may actually make for a better mold than what Polycarbonate can do due to stretching and elongation properties of the silicone. That being said, an "avg" size mold would run between $30-$50 each.  Better than getting an injection mold created, but also more expensive than just buying commercially available molds.

Anyone trying any of the above options? What are your thoughts on it? If you've tried it, how is it working for you?

Want more information on Industrial Chocolate Molds(de,ru,fr)? Feel free to contact us.

updated by @timwilde: 12/13/24 12:15:15