Discover How Rapid Tooling Helps Develop Products Lightning Fast

1. Discover How Rapid Tooling Helps Develop Products Lightning Fast Molds and tools form the foundation of manufacturing. Cutting tools and developing molds for production are among the most significant costs manufacturers have to think about when developing a product. On top of this, there is also the question of time to market, hence the pressure to develop and produce products rapidly. Prior to mass production and rapid tooling technologies, creating a functional prototype had been a costly and demanding process. Because of the costs associated with prototyping and the time that it takes to produce prototypes the conventional way, prototyping was for the longest time out of reach of small enterprises and product manufacturers who do not have much budget to spare for this additional step in the manufacturing process. Fortunately, rapid tooling helps cut down the cost of prototyping, not to mention its impact on the speed at which products are developed and put up for full production. Rapid tooling enables much faster mold construction, reducing the time it takes to produce tooling by a significant amount of time. Conventional production tooling is typically made using hardened steel—a material that can be extremely difficult to work, shape, and polish. This not only means a higher cost of production, but also slower mold fabrication. Rapid tooling, on the other hand, makes use of aluminum alloy and similar, much softer materials, which are a lot easier to process and work into a tool or mold, compared to steel. This pares down the time it takes to produce molds and allows for more manageable and favorable production timetables. With today’s consumer demands becoming more and more centered on faster time to market and with product lifecycles increasingly becoming shorter and shorter, it is crucial for product developers to find better ways to improve production and ensure faster turnaround in all aspects of production.