Although great rapid epoxy tooling have been made in rapid epoxy tooling systems and materials toward producing stronger, more accurate and better surface finish prototypes, there is a great demand for tooling to produce prototypes in the production material and using the production process.

rapid epoxy tooling article

Such prototypes are often referred to as technical prototypes. If these technical prototypes are to be produced in short time scales then low-cost, reliable rapid tooling technologies are required.

Two broad classifications of rapid tooling techniques are direct and indirect. Direct approaches use a rapid prototyping-based process to make tooling inserts directly, whereas indirect methods use the RP process to generate a pattern from which the tooling inserts are made. This rapid epoxy tooling article describes two such indirect rapid tooling processes - cast resin and sprayed metal tooling.

The processes are assessed in terms of their impact on the product development business through cost and time savings. Indirect Tooling - Cast Resin Cast resin and sprayed metal tooling have been in existence for more than 20 years but their reliance on the availability of accurate patterns somewhat limited their application. Since rapid prototyping (RP) systems became available, offering fast production of accurate parts that can be used as patterns for tooling, there has been renewed interest in these already well-established technologies.

Both techniques, when coupled with RP technologies, can produce prototype tooling for processes such as injection molding, compression molding and blow molding in very short time frames and at very low cost. The low cost can mainly be attributed to the low cost of the materials used to manufacture the tooling. Typically both processes require skilled or semi-skilled labor, so the labor cost may be relatively higher than with other rapid epoxy tooling techniques.