In a message dated 98-09-25 11:28:38 EDT, bxy0487@oak.njit.edu writes:
<< Rapid tooling is more attractive to inductries than RP is. Does anyong
know any viable rapid tooling process which can match the conventional
tooling in terms of accuracy, cost and durability?
Your reply is greatly appreciated!
Bo Yang
>>
My name is Bob Morton from Fusion Engineering
We are the rapid prototyping division of a large worldwide mold building
company in business 45 yrs. We became a licensee for the 3D Keltool process
about 10 months ago. We are having tremendous success 3D Keltool. We are
building mostly semi-production and production molds with the process. We are
amazed at what we can build with this process and are extremely happy with the
results, as are our customers. Most of the molds we have produced to date are
2 color (2 shot ) molds for our Swedish operation. Some of the more aware
companies in this country have begun to look into the process a little. I
expect the process could become as popular here as it is in Europe in a couple
years.
When building production tooling the accuracy is determined by the
customers final requirements. The toolmaker must maintain those tolorerances
regardless of the process used to make the mold. The 3D Keltool mold cost is
normally about 2/3 the cost and 2/3 the delivery of P20 tooling. The
durability we have found to be slightly better than P20 molds. Replacement
cavities are extremely inexpensive to produce. This opens the posibility to
disposable cavities which you throw away after a million shots or so, then
just pop in a replacement cavity. Kind of like those BIC razors you just use
and throw away.
I hope this answered your questions
regards
Bob Morton
Fusion Engineering Rockford Il USA
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:46:48 EEST