Rapid Tooling: Its Processes, Advantages, and Applications

If you want to market your product faster, you will need rapid prototyping to make the parts readily available for testing. There are many innovations in the manufacturing industry in recent years. And among them are the various rapid prototyping techniques that can help the design team during the product development phase. It&#;s called rapid prototyping.

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Thanks to rapid tooling, parts are manufactured quickly to test and validate them before going into production tooling. There are different names for rapid tooling. Some people call it prototypes tooling, soft tooling, or prototype mold. For now, let us stick with rapid tooling.

This article will dig deeper into this buzzword and look at its advantages and applications. Before we move into that, let us first get to know what rapid tooling is.

The Beginning of Rapid Tooling

Simply put, rapid tooling is a process of creating a prototype in a short time. It all began in the s where engineers using plastic injection molding tried to find ways to create molds in days or even hours instead of the number of months it took them to produce a machine mold.

Parts made through rapid tooling is a perfect solution to test and evaluate a prototype and make a few hundred parts before actually going into full production mode. Rapid tooling techniques build inserts like the core, side actions, and cavity of the parts. It all depends on the rapid tooling employed; it can produce parts through multiple cycles out of the same mold.

There are many rapid tooling techniques to choose from, and each type can have various benefits. You have many factors to consider for getting the most of these benefits because it varies depending on the size, consistency, technology, accuracy, and the materials you will use.

You have to keep the following limitations in mind, too, if you are considering rapid tooling to make your prototype.

#1 The mold should be strong

The mold has to be durable so that it can manage the injection molding method. The molding machines clamped heated materials into the mold at pounds per inch, so the molds should withstand the injections.

#2 The mold should be smooth

Aside from being strong, it should also be smooth to inject the plastic cleanly. This characteristic is critical because it is needed for each ejection. In rapid tooling, some processes add materials layer by layer, so it&#;s not smooth. In this case, the prototype requires additional finishing to be viable for prototyping.

One thing about rapid tooling is it uses the exact material of the final product. It&#;s good because you can have a more precise idea of how the parts will be in actual utilization. Thus, you can explore and confirm if you have the right material.

Benefits of Rapid Tooling

Here are the other benefits of rapid tooling

It provides an opportunity for innovation

Because rapid tooling eliminates the use of conventional tooling, it initiates up a new range of opportunities for improvements. Traditional prototyping takes a long time because it needs making the prototype tooling and its components to exact the tolerances. In rapid prototyping, the designers can conceive complex geometries that will be impossible to develop in conventional prototyping too.

Time-saving

Rapid tooling is time-saving because it eliminates the need to produce molds, patterns, and special tools that you used in conventional tooling. Because of this, rapid tooling shortened the time between the initial idea and evaluation.

The resulting prototypes are accurate and readily accessible for testing the forms, features, usability, and performance. Its designers can also modify the product based on the feedback. A fast turnaround can help the company to obtain a competitive edge to bring new products into the market.

Cost Savings

Another benefit of rapid tooling is the cost savings. The part produced in rapid tooling is synonymous with full-scale production. You can use these parts for impact and stress testing. With the results from testing, you can determine the changes needed before going into an expensive tooling process.

Applications of Rapid Tooling

There are many applications for rapid tooling, and these applications will continue to grow because of the development of new procedures. Here are some of them:

The making of molds &#; both metallic and non-metallic molds can be made through rapid tooling.

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The making of casting shapes and cores &#; SLS application is the latest technology invented in sand casting shapes and cores.

The electrodes for EDM, making of marking stamps, production of hybrid patterns for casting, and producing splintering tools are some of the applications of rapid tooling.

There are many reasons why you should consider rapid tooling. It is a low cost, quick and effective way that will allow you to market parts faster. The cost advantage is the most useful because it will enable market testing, which is suitable for low volume production.

What is on-demand rapid tooling and low-volume molding?

From the dashboard of your car to the lid of your coffee cup, billions upon billions of everyday objects are brought into the world by molding, a process in which a hollow container is filled with a molten material to produce large numbers of a single object.

Since molding allows multiple copies of a single product to be produced, it is usually associated with mass manufacturing. However, with new digital manufacturing technologies like additive manufacturing (3D printing) and CNC machining, it is now possible to create a kind of prototype mold in an extremely short space of time. This process is known as rapid tooling.

While molds created via rapid tooling are not usually used for the mass production of objects, they can still be used to produce many copies of a single item. For this reason, low-volume molding &#; the creation of small quantities of molded products &#; is often carried out in conjunction with rapid tooling, giving customers a batch of a prototype product rather than just a single copy.

The advantages of rapid prototyping and low-volume molding are numerous. What follows is an overview of some of the key benefits of the two related processes.

Advantages of rapid tooling and low-volume molding

One of the biggest advantages of rapid tooling is right there in the name: speed. Since digital manufacturing technologies like additive manufacturing and CNC machining can be used to create molds in a very short space of time, rapid tooling service providers can offer fast turnarounds on products made with those molds. For businesses, that means getting hold of products faster and getting them to market sooner.

There are also big cost advantages to rapid tooling. Since the bulk of the process involves just a computer and an automated machine like a 3D printer, rapid tooling ends up being far cheaper than traditional toolmaking, with cost savings passed on to the customer. This results in affordable molded products even in low volumes.

Besides time and cost savings, there are other more specific benefits to rapid tooling and low-volume molding, some of which relate to the digital manufacturing processes used to create the molds. Since CAD is used to create the mold, manufacturers can ensure consistency across several molds by simply reusing the same digital file. Digitally creating these tools also allows for easy optimization of cooling channels and other features, and for quick modifications on future molds.

On-demand rapid tooling and low-volume molding is also, for several reasons, an effective precursor to mass manufacturing a product.

For one, rapid tooling can be used to mold products in a range of materials, and since the molds can be produced extremely quickly, manufacturers can make small quantities of a product in different materials and finishes, helping the customer decide on the ideal configuration for their product.

Secondly, such prototype molds are useful for bridge production, when, for example, a customer needs to get the first batch of products to market before regular tooling has been completed. Low-volume molding of a product can also help a customer iron out any previously unnoticed flaws in a product before moving on to mass production.

On-demand rapid tooling and low-volume molding with 3ERP

With many years of experience in the rapid prototyping industry, China&#;s 3ERP is an expert in rapid tooling and low-volume molding, possessing both the skills and equipment to reap the advantages of the processes.

In terms of its rapid tooling capabilities, 3ERP is able to offer two metal options: aluminum mold tooling, which is highly cost-effective and suitable for prototypes, and steel mold tooling, which can be used with abrasive, corrosive, and engineering-grade plastics and which can be used to make millions of molded parts &#; ideal for bridge production. Molds can be made according to DME, HASCO and LKM standards.

Those metal mold options are, however, just the start of the material possibilities offered by 3ERP. When the molds are ready for use, customers are provided with significant flexibility in the ensuing low-volume molding stage.

Molded products can be made from a wide range of plastics, including nylons, polycarbonates and thermoplastic elastomers, and are available in a large number of colors and finishes, including laser finishing and heat staking.