A quick checklist for casting-ready CAD
July 2026 · By JewelDraft
Draft placeholder — replace with final copy.
“Casting-ready” is easy to say and easy to get wrong. A model can look flawless on screen and still fail on the tree — a wall too thin to fill, a gate in the wrong place, no shrinkage allowance for the alloy. Below is the short list we run before any file leaves the studio.
1. Wall thickness
Thin walls are where most pours go wrong. As a working floor we keep solid walls around 0.8 mm, and step up where a section carries stones, prongs or engraving stress. The point is not a single magic number — it is checking every face rather than trusting the thickest one. Prong tips, gallery rails and the underside of a head are the usual thin spots to inspect.
2. Sprues and gates
Sprue and gate placement decides how cleanly metal reaches the far edges of the piece. We place gates into the heaviest sections so the thin details fill last, keep the feed short and direct, and avoid gating straight onto a visible surface that will need heavy finishing later. Getting this right on the model — not at the bench — is what stops half-filled shanks and porous shoulders.
3. Shrinkage allowance
Metal shrinks as it cools, and different alloys shrink by different amounts. A model exported at nominal size can come out of the mold undersized — a ring that no longer matches its stated finger size. We apply a shrinkage allowance for the intended alloy before export, so the cast piece lands on size instead of a size small.
4. The reports that ship with the file
A castable file is only half of a useful delivery. Every model goes out with two things attached:
- A metal-weight estimate across karats, so quoting does not wait on a test cast.
- An exact stone-count report — cut, size and quantity — so stone ordering is done before the tree.
Files go out as clean STL or 3MF for printing and casting, with a native 3DM master when you want an editable file on hand for later variants.
One last pass
Before sign-off we do a final watertight check — no open edges, no flipped normals, no self-intersections that a slicer will choke on. It takes minutes and saves a wasted pour. Turnaround for a clean model runs from 24h — typically 1–2 business days, and every project is handled NDA-safe by default.
Want this run on your next piece? See how our casting-ready file service handles the checklist end to end.