On Wednesday, July 3, 2019 at 9:54:37 PM UTC-7, pyotr filipivich wrote:

thinking of doing some small (and I do mean _small_) milling, to
make a set of molds for casting type for hand setting printing (aka
"Letter Press").
The molten plastic ink jet printer I helped develop in the 1980's
could 3D-print mirrored and color-separated (CYMK) offset printing
press plates.

Which is so totally what I do NOT want to do.

If I wanted build a printer, I'd have asked how to do that.

One can get job-shops to do the 3D printing; the old IBM typeballs were
nickel-plated plastic, seemed to print entirely adequately.

Or (in linotype fashion) you could carve some soft material to make a matrix,
then cast type against that. Instead of a mill, the matrices could be (old technology)
produced with a pattern lathe.

Milling anything hard, and keeping tight tolerances, is a difficult combination. Clamping
any workpiece as small as a letter is a project all in itself.