What Is Rapid Tooling and What Are Its Advantages?
Rapid Tooling is the result of the unison of Rapid Prototyping techniques with conventional tooling practices in order to produce a mold quickly. This process, as well, is used to prepare parts of a functional model from CAD data in less time and at a lower cost. The cost is low in comparison to the traditional machining methods. To be precise, Rapid Tooling can serve as a channel to production injection molded parts.
Either, Rapid Tooling brings to use a Rapid Prototyping model as a pattern, or uses the Rapid Prototyping services directly so as to fabricate a tool for a limited quantities of prototypes. As it cannot be denied that expensive tooling cost is fair only if the volume of production is high. Actually the way to produce tooling quicker and in a cost effective manner where small manufacturing quantity is concerned, Rapid Tooling comes as a resort.
There always is a need for some intermediate tooling to produce a small quantity of prototypes or functional tests during the product development cycle. These small volumes are used for marketing samples, evaluation purposes, and as production process design. Thus, Rapid Tooling has become all the more important to manufacturing industry.
There are several advantages of Rapid Tooling, comprising:
- Tooling time is much shorter than for a conventional tool
- Tooling cost is much less than for a conventional tool
- However, the main challenge that generally is faced in the case of rapid tooling is the tool life. The tool life is less than that of conventional tools and tolerances happen to be wider than that of conventional tools.
Advantages of Rapid Tooling:
- Rapid tooling is the process of building core and cavity inserts as a product of rapid prototyping technology. This process has got a number of merits including
- the product is brought into the market earlier than the scheduled time
- people can get the products at a lower price as compared to the price when products are mass produced using injection tools
- it facilitates the production of various products in a wider range of materials
- it lowers the time and cost of the product manufacture
- Rapid tooling is mainly used for specific small quantity needs including prototyping
- It may as well be used for troubleshooting existing problems
- Rapid tooling is being used these days to create molds for commercial operations since the time lag is so short between start to finish
- Moreover, alternate methods require precious time and resources, thus, rapid tooling serves as a quicker way to produce the required products. This allows companies to quickly produce commercial products with the benefits of rapid prototyping.
Additional benefits:
- Rapid tooling provides the customization necessary for personal applications, having refrained from tedious trial and error measurements. It involves putting design through a CAD program, wherein a personal custom mold can be created to fix the problem.
- It is the staff that is employed who determines the type of rapid tooling materials to produce driven by the availability and demand of the client.
- The staffs at Vaarpu is well equipped to handle your Rapid Tooling requirements. Get in touch with them today!
