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Good stuff.
Here is what I am talking about, but I am not really mechanical enough to understand the tooling too much myself! You guys will probably understand what I have here much better than I do and will correct my terminology.
The top picture is a basic mold pack age, with cooling set, etc. The bottom 2 pictures are the outside and inside of the top of a pear tray cavity. It looks pretty freaking intricate to me, so I am wondering if eventually a 3D printer will be able to replicate it for a fraction of the cost and in far less time. Right now, a simple mistake in tooling can cost months of before a product can actually be made.
If you look REALLY closely at the "inside" picture you will see small pinholes all over it. The holes (and the channels) are to force air through to release the polystyrene after it is formed. Each cycle is about 2 seconds long and the mold set is 6up cavities, so each 2 seconds it makes 6 trays. It has to cool just perfectly during those 2 seconds to form and then the air has to eject it without the sheet being too hot or else it will blow holes into the tray.
I guess that you sort of answered my question as to why these things are so expensive!!!!
So between apple and pears, there are currently 48 different types/sizes that need to be made. Fortunately the molds are somewhat shared, so there are really only 5 mold bases to go with the 48 different cavity types but it's still a lot of money I think and it would seem like an awful lot of it could be done with a 3D printer then "cleaned up" by a qualified machinist.
On a side note, how are you going to fit behind the wheel of a new C8?
2 Cavity tool, running multi versions, by means of interchangeable inserts.
Pit Row
I’ve had to order a bunch of those, though, and they are some pretty big checks to write!
I’m currently trying to find a better way to do some of the mold changes, our 40+ yr old small Toyota lift is at the end of its lifespan and was grey market to begin with. They don’t make them as small as that one anymore that has at least a 3K lifting capacity so it’s time to research die change carts that fit into an unorthodox space.
We currently build allot of compression and vac form tooling, which runs in a much smaller press
than a standard injection mold for obvious reasons...
While you will have some big costs in tooling, depending on how many parts you're making, you can get tooling costs back quickly.
The part Alph showed for instance. That might take several hours to print, and in that time you could have hundreds of them injecting.
Now, the advantage is what JeremyK mentioned above, the inside can have whatever % infill you desire and the walls can have any thickness. Most parts are the most highly stressed on their outer surface, so if we removed some material from the core it really wouldn’t effect strength all that much, however with conventional machining this just isn’t possible. If you’ve got the time and resources (ie F1 and other specialty applications), you can make some seriously bad ass stuff after post processing.
I’m anxiously awaiting the day when metal printing becomes viable for home use, I don’t think we’re more than 5-10 years away. The thought of expanding 3DP into metal parts gets me excited in weird places
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