molding rapid tooling? A mere 17 years ago this month, stereolithography debuted at the Autofact show in Detroit. This ushered in rapid prototyping (RP), the process of creating physical models out of plastic directly from computer-aided design (CAD) geometry files.

molding rapid tooling article

Gone would be the clay, wooden, and metal models that took lots of time and more money to produce. Back then, trade show attendees all stood in awe as cute, little gears and propellers and chess pieces and dinosaurs and so many more things essentially grew in the RP machines—right before our eyes.

Better than pens, rulers, and other trinkets handed out at trade shows, attendees coveted these semitransparent or opaque prototypes out of plastic resin. A lot has changed since then. The number of RP vendors has expanded and then consolidated. The number of RP materials has grown to satisfy all sorts of applications. More impressive, RP is no longer just for small parts, and RP parts are even being used in final assemblies. (Although those clay, wood and metal models have yet to disappear.) Fit to use molding rapid tooling Hyundai  (Seoul, Korea) got around the limits of RP size when it needed to check for mechanical interferences and evaluate the airflow in a dashboard it was designing for a Kia being introduced in North America at the end of this year. Needless to say, car dashboards are larger than your average chess piece. Much larger. The new Kia dashboard measures 20 in. x 18 in. x 54 in.

They have been using RP for about three years now on such projects as modeling ABS and airbag cases. These prototypes help  verify part designs, mold patterns, and the master model of a mold, principal research engineer at the Hyundai . In the past,  would have milled a prototype of the dashboard in plastic. While effective, producing an accurate prototype for testing would have taken more than 20 days. Much of that time would have been spent cutting out the complex backside surface of the dashboard, some of the walls in the dashboard measure only 1-mm or 2-mm thick, and some of the cavities in the dashboard are deep and difficult for a cutting tool to reach molding rapid tooling