Plastic Rapid Molds

 
Plastic mold makers consider about the value of prototyping whether that involves rapid prototyping of parts using one of the many manufacturing methods available (CNC prototype, SLA prototype, SLS prototype), or Rapid mold that will mold parts in the actual plastic material. Typically, if the company wants several pieces to check and prove out the design, they’ll use SLS, SLA or silicone molds. But what is the value of prototype tooling? Should you spend the additional money to make a prototyping tooling built to produce parts the parts you want in the actual resin required
 
Prototype tooling can help you when you are not sure of the part’s functionality or mold ability, or even whether or not the marketing department will like the design or function of the new product. Especially it is very important if you want to mold millions of units and put it into market.
 
You can use a pre-production prototype tooling to help you in proving a part’s form, fit, function and value, and prototype tooling help the OEM’s engineers and the mold makers engineers to collaborate in a way that the OEM gets the part they need, prior to building a high-production mold. Most mold makers supply a variety of methods to achieve the OEM’s goals: prototype parts can be helpful and a cost effective way to test form and fit, and while not always in the polymer material that is ultimately required, provides a “touchy feely” part that helps with initial evaluation. Many rapid prototype equipment manufacturers are developing a wider range of materials however, that produces a greater opportunity to prototype in the end-use material. There are many options available to produce prototype parts, and Realhao industrial is one of the best partnership with a service department if the customer do not have rapid prototyping in house.
 
Another prototype process is to make a core and cavity in either Direct Metal Laser Sintering process or in “soft” tooling (P-20 or aluminum). We call it rapid prototype tooling. Many customer want to build a pre-production mold or “bridge” mold that can that can be expanded to accommodate production molding. A rapid tooling only have on core and one cavity in a large mold base, if there is a large demand for the parts, we can expanded the rapid tool into four or eight cavities for big scale production. Some times we also called it pre-production mold.
 
A soft tool can qualify the molded plastic parts with several hundred or even several thousand pieces of molded parts. This method has been preferred by many OEMs. Realhao Industrial specialized in aluminum tooling (Alu 6061and Alu 7075) for prototype, short and medium production runs. The mold lift of this kind of can reach 2000pieces to 5000pieces of plastic injection molding parts. But now there are more and more methods to make prototypes with more and more lower cost. The customers do not prefer the rapid tooling before realized the new products. Rapid molds only be used after the prototype has been made. In a worlds, rapid molds are not used to realized the parts but to test the market. Customers can save much cost on it.
 
In order to help customer with prototype requirements, Realhao Industrial set up an research and develop department to build plastic prototyping (rapid molds) in house. The advantage of our research and develop facility to customers is we have the ability to design and build high quality, high precision pre-production molds, quickly and cost effectively. When the customer is ready to develop a new products, Realhao Industrial will have a meeting with customer to discuss hot make the rapid tooling with them.
 
Customer can have greater opportunity to get true-to-spec dimensionally correct parts in hand through developmental prototype molds. Comparing with the multi-cavity production mold, the rapid tooling can reduce mold-build time and cost at the same time laying to the groundwork of critical manufacturing information.
 
A USA customer came to Realhao Industrial Company with a batty cover for hybrid car. They needed 1000pieces of parts with material of PC in half a year. But they required Realhao to develop first batch of the 200pcs of molded parts in 60 days. Due to the part is a little big with the sizes of 600mm long and with 600pcs same holds on the parts. We built the mold with 6061 aluminum with hardness of 38 HRC and divided the mold into several small parts. In order to save mold making cost, we adopted cold runner and with 4 direct gates on parts for this molds. Finally, we made the mold on the cost of 3/5 hardened mold in 45days and our price is 30% lower than other mold suppliers. After we produced 600pcs of parts to the customer, they developed a similar product. We changed the mold inserts but used the same mold core and mold base to produce the similar parts. Finally we save much more half of the prices for customer to develop the new products. Half a year later, the customer required our company to make the large-production molds for them and deliver the molds to their subsidiary company in Suzhou, China.