FOPAT Can Save On Tooling Costs and Expedite Delivery

Category: Newsletter Spring 2011

FOPAT Can Save On Tooling Costs and Expedite Delivery

Today, manufacturers are seeking a competitive edge in this economy and are constantly looking for new innovative methods to streamline their processes, reduce tooling costs, and bring their products faster to market. Since the 90’s, the investment casting industry has gone from traditional wax patterns to rapid prototype (RP) patterns using SLA (stereolithography) to help decrease time and increase productivity. Despite the earlier problems faced in using SLA with the traditional wax process, technology has improved allowing RP patterns to be suitable for low production use in the investment casting industry.

Although RP technology has eliminated the need for expensive tooling typically associated with wax patterns, there still is significant cost in producing patterns. Because of this, you will quickly lose any cost advantage using this method except for the lowest volumes. This is where the FOPAT technology has really excelled. The characteristics of the FOPAT material allows the manufacturing of tooling with inexpensive materials and simple designs. Since FOPAT is injected at a very low pressure and utilizes an exothermic process, little to no heat is required to be added or removed from the tooling material allowing less energy intensive and less expensive tools than those traditionally used. In most cases the FOPAT material really becomes cost effective over wax patterns and RP pattern production in the manufacturing of short-run patterns (in the range of 5 to 200 pieces).

A good example to show how tooling cost can be less expensive is the Handle Tooling (as shown on the right). Here is a situation where a single SLA would cost $1,800. A quantity of 10 SLA’s would cost $12,330. The tooling and 10 FOPAT patterns would cost $6,200, almost half the cost of SLA’s. Designing the tooling to make the pattern in two halves eliminated any need for slides or cores that would have been required to make the part in wax, a fact that would increase the tooling cost and manufacturing cost in wax tremendously. The FOPAT halves are easily assembled. Tool lead time was 5 days and the first patterns were produced in a day. From that point forward with tooling in hand patterns can be produced quickly, accurately, and at a cost far less than that of a SLA .

Keep in mind that the savings in tooling doesn’t stop there. Perhaps there are changes in the design over the life of the part, or the worse case a replacement is needed, this type of tooling is far less expensive than wax tooling. The cost effectiveness will vary depending on the design and complexity of the part you wish to make. However, in almost every case FOPAT should be considered for future investment casting needs!