Rapid Tooling Additive Manufacturing
3D printing and additive manufacturing is a main process of rapid tooling. FDM, SLA, SLS and binder jetting are used to create master patterns for soft tooling and direct tools and mold. As the market demand increases, 3D printing is becoming popular in producing fixtures ad tools which significantly speed up the whole production process and lower the costs. The additive manufacturing technology cost-effectively creates components layers by layers use polymer or metal. Traditional manufacturing can‘t create parts with complex geometries but additive manufacturing can do.
With the 3D printing, manufacturers can test the prototypes and evaluate the quality and performance. 3D printed tools can be used to produce small bath production run and customized orders. In high volume mass production, traditional tools like injection molding or CNC machining will be involved to build industrial-grade tooling after the 3D printing prototypes molds are tested and verified. This means 3D printing and additive manufacturing offers the chance to test and optimize the tool design before manufacturers invest a large amount of money production tooling.
Rapid Tooling Additive rapid manufacturing has numerous advantages. When in injection molding production, tooling cost is usually amortized. The more parts produced by a mold, the lower cost per unit will be. If using traditional mold making methods to produce prototypes or just small batch production, the unit cost per part is not competitive. Compared to traditional tools, rapid tooling has cost advantages. It save around more than 90% compared to using traditional tools which make tooling are accessible for those manufacturers with limited budget. Using traditional tooling process usually take several months to complete orders, with rapid tooling, lead times can be shortened to few weeks or even few days. This fast turnaround time help to speed up the whole process of production which is allow manufacturers to put their product to the market faster than other competitors. Rapid tooling provides chance to improve the mold design until the parts have perfect properties and functions. Design errors can be adjusted before mass production which eliminates additional time and cost.
TEAM Rapid has built a long term partnerships with various customers in different industry. If you need help on your Rapid tooling additive manufacturing projects, please contact us at [email protected] for a free quote.
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