Plastic Tooling Manufacture

Our dedicated tool room is fully equipped to manage small repairs through to machining new tools. Over 90% of our customer tooling is made in house which gives us the ability to flex and react if there are requirements for fast turnaround jobs. Whilst utilising the in-house bolster sets, much of our plastic tooling can be made on inserts which further reduces cost and time which is of great benefit to our customer base. Did you know? If your tools are made to our specified standard, we guarantee the tooling for the lifetime of the project.

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Our 3 machining centres use the latest CAD CAM technologies to ensure the highest machining accuracy. Our 2 Hurco machines are specified to machine steel for the injection moulding tools, our Haas VF9 is specified for aluminium as this machines the vacuum form tools. With dedicated time served Tool Makers, Tool Setters and Designers, you know your projects are in good hands from start to finish. Not only do we have CAD CAM machining centres, we are fully equipped with new Spark Eroders, Wire EDM machines, Lathes & all other ancillary equipment. Once your project becomes live and undergoes our contract review stage. We then review the components you have sent us to ensure what you need is what you get, this is known as the DFM. Through our Tool Design team, we review the components supplied and offer up any kind of tweaks and improvements to ensure the parts can mould and we do not find any unforeseen issues.

How long do tools take?

This is one of the questions we get asked the most. There are so many variables in tool manufacture that no one rule can be applied. In cases, we have Contract Reviewed and moulded trial 1 sample parts within 10 working days. Other cases we have been 10+ weeks. It can often vary on the volume of work in the tool room, along with the complexity of the tool.

Process

Step 1

Once we have initiated the project and submitted our project plan. The most important element of the tool design is the DFM (Design for Manufacture). This is where we review the CAD models supplied by the customer.

Step 2

In some cases, the parts need to be amended or modified to ensure they will mould without issue. We present this information via presentation format with the associated part drawings.

Step 3

Once the customer has approved this, it allows us to move through to the next gateway which is buying in billet.

Step 4

Now we have finalized part design, the tool design can fully commence. Most of the tooling is machined on one of our Hurco CAD CAM tooling centres. However, much of the tool manufacture isn’t just done by the push of a button.

Step 5

The intricate work of our tool makers who do the finishing details on the bench help ensure the finest of details can be met. Once we have completed the tool manufacture, we will move the tool to our production facility to start our trial mouldings.

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Plastic Tooling Manufacture

Process

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