Die Cast Custom Tooling

What Is Rapid Tooling?

Rapid tooling is often referred to as prototype tooling, bridge tooling, or soft tooling. Rapid tooling is a crucial step on the path to production. It involves the manufacture of tools used to create products, such as rapid injection molds, rapid die cast molds, sheet metal prototype molds, quick and easy jigs and fixtures, and other custom parts.

Therefore, creating rapid tooling to conduct trial production of hundreds or even thousands of parts before mass production is a very useful process for design optimization, functional testing, or pre-production verification.

Common Types Of Rapid Tooling

Aluminum Mold Tooling

This is the ideal choice for prototype injection molding because it is a cost-effective means of producing injection molded parts. Using aluminum ensures dimensional stability in the mold tooling, significantly reducing waste production and part deformation during production. Aluminum molds are also easier to cut, thereby reducing tooling costs by up to 25%. Using aluminum molds also reduces cycle times by 30-40%. All of these combine to ensure faster turnarounds.

Steel Mold Tooling

Steel is a high-quality, solid, and sturdy material with a longer life cycle. It is more suitable for high-volume production runs and for producing molds from engineering-grade plastics. Despite its long life cycle, it is more expensive than aluminum and may require more time to produce mold tooling and prototypes.

Rapid Tooling & Prototype Injection Molding Services

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Quality Tooling

As with all Innovacastsdie casting services, you can rest assured every step of the process is guided by high standards in quality assurance. Regular testing and verifying at various stages of manufacturing helps us deliver a high-quality product every time.

How Does Injection Mold Tooling Work?

Need as few as 100 or more than 100,000 injection molded parts? Injection mold tooling is a cost-effective solution for your product development process.

Optimized Design for Manufacturability (DFM)

We incorporate design for manufacturability (DFM) into every aspect of the injection molding process, from part design to injection mold tooling, materials selection, and machining process. No need to wait until production to reveal issues with the design. Our optimized design for manufacturability ensures cost-effective tooling and molding of parts to scale.

Choose the Right Material of Mold Tools

The right material for mold tools will involve considerations such as intended use, volume requirements, design complexity, and mold structure. Not sure which tooling materials to choose? WayKen will help you weigh each of these advantages to find the best rapid tooling solution for your product needs.
We can make rapid mold tools from Aluminum 7075, P20, and NAK80 semi-hardened steels and H13 fully-hardened steel. In addition, we also offer standard SPI finishes, EDM texturing, and a range of etched textures.

Rapid Tooling Manufacturing Process

In order to fully satisfy the need for rapid production and low-cost reduction, normally we utilize the Master Unit Die Quick-Change (MUD) System which is proven to save rapid tooling process time and reduce costs. Even more importantly, engineering changes involve only the MUD mold insert, not an entire standard mold base. You can also group several similar parts together on what is known as a family tool for greater savings. In addition, manual or semi-automatic inserts are also often used in rapid mold tooling.

DIE CAST CUSTOM TOOLING