The Reason for Mold Manufacturers Choosing 3D Printing

With the development of 3D printing, additive manufacturing or  3D printing is not a new technology for us. With the technology of metal 3D printing, More than tens of metals are widely used in various areas with outstanding precision and performance. Also, it has not limited to prototyping but also the high-quality accessories in our life.

With the practice of the metal SLM printing technology, it has been realized to produce various metals to meet the requirements in different sizes. The main application of it — the aerospace industry uses it to manufacture assorted high precision and quality-requirement accessories. And Injection modeling manufacturers use it to produce plugins and ventilator scoops for thermoplastic parts from automobiles to households, etc.

One of the rapid development applications for Mold 3D printing is an injection and casting molding production such as cavity and core etc. Why do these manufacturers use 3D printing as a priority choice for molding?

There are three reasons:

1, some of the inner structures of the mold cannot be made by traditional technology and can only adopt 3D printing for production. If you have some complicated shape parts, which cannot be produced with conventional technology, you can do it easily with 3D printing. What’s more, when the accessories meet the standard of 3D printing, it could not have extra cost. Even traditional CNC can produce a straight line and right angle, but it is hard to realize the spiral cool down and heat channel. In addition, 3D printing tech can print diverse parts which need to cool down or bubbler. All these allow you to have better control over mold temperature, reduce broken items, shorten production time, improve size precision and surface finish and promote the out of molding. The optimized cool-down line is called conformal cooling, which has been proved would save 25% to 75% of the time during production. It is tempting for manufacturers who want to cut costs and improve efficiency.

 2, Lower the manufacturing investment. With 3D printing, you need not employ many engineers and operators for parts production, which avoids the cost of Multiple processing. It can help you save up to 65% of costs compared with traditional technology.

3, 3D printing can shorten shaping and delivery time with the conformal cooling channel and Thermal Management Technology, which is an advantage for emergency projects. Even if they need the same time in the design stage, the 3D printing can produce in parts in days, even the same day after the design is done. However, the traditional process needs several weeks or even months to complete the mold, which lowers the efficiency and delivery time.

Now, molding 3d printing is only a tiny part of the molding. But with the development, it would be widely applicated in mold making to reduce the time for prototyping and molding to speed the delivery and reduce cost. In the future,3D printing will be an essential selection liking the CNS process and EDM.

WKproto is a professional rapid prototyping and low-volume production manufacture specializing in 3D printing, CNC machining, and Vacuum Casting. Our factory and parter factories enable rapid prototyping of designs from our customers and low volume production for market verification.

We have three factories. 3D printing factory meets the demands of most 3D printing services with 100 SLA machines, 10 SLS machines, 10 MJF machines, 10 SLM machines, and 20 FDM machines. CNC machining factories for processing metals, plastic and more materials with more than 200 machines for CNC milling/CNC lathes/EDM / Wire EDM and the Vacuum Casting factory is for low volume production for ABS、PC、PP、PE、PA、POM、PMMA、PVC.