AdvancedTek Part of the Week – 1/13/16
This week’s highlighted part is a 3D printed mold produced from a local Minnesota manufacturer in the Agriscience/Technology industry. The parts in the photo are a mold master and pick outs that are used to make a silicone mold. These PolyJet parts are air and water tight and have an excellent surface finish due to the 16- or 30-micron layer thickness. These attributes of PolyJet technology offer great quality mold finish, which in turn produces good quality poured urethane parts that can be used for low volume production. The part on the bottom right is the finished cast urethane part.
Prior to having direct access to their Stratasys 3D printers from AdvancedTek, this customer was purchasing low volume parts from outside quick-turn injection molding services that were very expensive. With this service, they did not own the tooling and were not able to make changes without adding to the cost.
Their solution to reducing the cost of these parts was to produce poured urethane parts in-house with direct access to a PolyJet 3D printer. The addition of this technology allowed them to quickly produce 3D printed mold masters for making the silicone molds that can then cast multiple urethane parts. This process has not only saved them time and money, but has also allowed them to produce custom parts that opened the door to new industries in other parts of the world.
*This customer also utilizes Stratasys FDM technology for prototyping, testing and end use parts, which may be highlighted as a future AdvancedTek part of the week.
Posted by Matt Havekost, AdvancedTek Director of Sales – Additive Manufacturing