What Is Rapid Prototyping?

Rapid prototyping means making a physical sample of a new product design idea. This is done as a preliminary step towards eventual production, and is most useful when verifying that the finished product will look, feel, and perform as intended. New product developers turn to rapid prototyping for several reasons. They’re used for functional testing, approvals, design iterations, for crowdfunding campaigns, trade show models, and as a bridge to low-volume manufacturing.

Rapid Tooling

Rapid Tooling (RT) describes a process that is the result of combining Rapid Prototyping techniques with conventional tooling practices to produce a mold quickly or parts of a functional model from CAD data in less time and at a lower cost relative to traditional machining methods. Rapid Tooling can act as a bridge to production injection molded parts.For rapid tooling, we can typically be 30-50% cheaper than full production tooling, with a 40-60% reduction in lead-time compared to traditional moulds.

Advantages of Rapid Tooling

Due to short tooling manufacture time and low cost in using RT, many engineers prefer to produce parts for functional test in the early design stage. As a result, many design faults are debugged before production, so many design failures are avoided.

● Prototypes in production material in little time, shorten the lead-time

● Low Cost - reduced Cost allowing real trials affordable
● Allows for full fit and function testing.
● Discover any design imperfection on early stage.
● Preceding production process- molds can produce thousands of parts.

At QC mold, we don't just produce plastic injection mold items. We are able to design and create molds for all types of plastic part applications, as well as create die cast molds and stamping mold for metal products. we offer mold try-out, and parts production using our Toshiba injection machines and die casting machines etc. For larger forged tooling and machining needs we also offer larger CNC and manual horizontal boring mills and vertical machining centers.