Plastic and Rubber. The stuff the world turns on in the 21st century. A whole segment of Advanced Concepts operations revolves around meeting the need of companies and individuals to have a single or several plastic parts made for the purpose of evaluating the fit or the mechanical properties of a given design. Given the cost of hard tooling for plastic or rubber molds and more importantly the cost attached to modifying that tooling, it's no suprise that we are called upon to produce test and evaluation items for pre-production. On our samples page we displayed a mold/pattern for casting medical models. It's primary function was to generate a metal mold for casting the pieces. Here we'll show a few applications where the mold was generated by LOM and plastic or rubber was cast directly for the application.

  Recently, Indian Motorcycles called us and needed a batch of a simple rubber part to test the assembly characteristics during product assembly. They were unsure of the proper shore hardness of the piece and not quite there with the design. Their molding vendor told them they needed to go directly to hard tooling. They needed 10 each of various hardnesses of the part to shove into a hole. By next week......

 We settled on a few remaining changes to the design, and proceeded to grow the molds. Pouring began the following day. The parts were color coded for shore hardness and the plugs were ready for testing within 7 days.  It wasn't necessary to chance quite a few thousand dollars on a design that was untested to find out if a given design was workable or not. The answer was readily at hand using the simple technique of growing a mold and using a cold pouring and set polyurethane. 

  Here's what our molds look like and what came out of them. We grew six of these and were pulling parts every 2 1/2 hours. Molds were filled and placed in a vacuum for 40 minutes to get the bubbles out, which is the method we use provided the mold isn't to large to fit in our vacuum chamber. The mold was parted and the parts removed. We like to allow our polyurethane to cure without being accelerated, but because of the size and simplicity of these we forced the cure. Each design needs to be evaluated for complexity, more complicated designs may need to have their pours done in such a way that time is allowed for extended pot life. That translates into "the more complex the part the longer it could take"......  to create the mold, to mix and pour the material and to cure.

For any shape of part, plastic or rubber we have a polyurethane or silicone that will match the characteristics of the material you desire to experiment with and the ability and know how to get that part into your hands in a very short period of time

We can produce in colors and even some diferent types of textures a wide, visually diverse range of product for your evaluation and pre-production needs.  Don't get caught feeling pressured to lay out for expensive tooling when we can make a small number of prototypes for a reasonable outlay and relatively quick turn around!