Indirect Tooling Research Articles

Shelling strategies to save time in a rapid tooling process

Selective laser sintering can be used to manufacture injection mould inserts using an indirect metal laser sintering process, such as the RapidTool™ process commercialised by 3D Systems. The volume of material to be laser processed for insert manufacturing is very high when compared to that for plastic prototype manufacturing. Consequently, the time involved in the laser processing is also very long. This paper describes the development and assessment of shelling strategies to be applied in an indirect rapid tooling process aimed at reducing time in the process. The feasibility of the shelling idea has been confirmed and although the scanning system offers some limitations to the idea two strategies are presented as successful, open shell and closed shell, with a great potential to save time.

Rapid Sheet Metal Manufacturing. Part 1: Indirect Rapid Tooling

Rapid Sheet Metal Manufacturing. Part 1: Indirect Rapid Tooling

Instant tools

Rapid prototyping (RP) technology has attracted a lot of attention as an effective tool to compress the new product development process and hence decrease the time to market. As RP technology continues to develop, other systems and processes, such as computer integrated manufacturing and metal injection moulding, are becoming available to industry. One such technology, driven by RP, is rapid tooling (RT) which has the potential to reduce product lead times. RT can be broken into two broad classifications: indirect and direct tooling. In producing a mould tool, for example, indirect tooling would use a master pattern, such as an RP model, to produce the mould cavity, whereas direct tooling would build the mould tool directly from CAD data. The paper reviews the prospects of creating a mould tool directly from a computer model.