rapid prototyping rapid tooling? The price of materials-the powder, binder, and ink that's used to print onto the powder-is also no longer a barrier. "Then there's the amortization of the print head. We use off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard print heads.

rapid prototyping rapid tooling article

All together, finished parts cost about $2.00/in.3. That's a solid cubic inch. Parts are typically hollow or honeycombed inside, so less powder is used and the price per part drops. (Powder not used to make a part, i.e., not made solid, can be reused.) The printer works just like a conventional home or office color printer. It prints in cyan, magenta, yellow, and clear or white.

Those four colors combine to theoretically create 16 million colors. In addition to coloring prototypes to match their end use, people use color for labeling, adding arrows and circles to highlight features, printing engineering text or revision blocks, and tagging prototypes with date information. Another office entry is the Eden260, a photopolymer-jetting system manufactured by Israel-based Objet Geometries. This RP system, explains Fred Fisher, product manager for rapid prototyping rapid tooling Line, is a "glorified hot-glue gun": Solid material is heated up, extruded in a semi-viscous state, and when it cools, it hardens into a solid part.

The system builds layers by jetting out tiny droplets of resin on top of the previous layers of resin, like an inkjet printer jets out tiny droplets of ink onto a piece of paper. Resolution is 16 microns (0.0006 in.). rapid prototyping rapid tooling materials are fully cured with UV light during the modeling process. Post-processing consists of removing the supports used to make the model, which is done at a standard water-jet station. Costing $99,000, the Eden260 can produce parts up to 10.2 x 9.8 x 8.1 in. The unit itself measures 34 x 30 x 47 in., weighs 620 lb., and plugs into any rapid prototyping rapid tooling.