Advanced Prototyping has been providing soft tooling in the category of rapid tooling for many years. Many of our customers have benefitted with this method because of its low cost, the flexibility of the mold, and that this is a low pressure process. The temperatures and pressures of thermosets are low enough to allow for the process to be done by hand, without expensive metal tools or injection molding presses.
Soft tooling and urethane casting are optimal solutions used when you need small quantity production. Generally, 50 parts and under are produced quickly before the molding tools break down. Our soft tooling is typically made of silicone rubber or epoxy resins . First, API uses a quality prototype part to create a flexible mold of your part. This master prototype can be a part that you supply or a 3D printed prototype that we can create from a 3D CAD drawing. After the mold is made, we can then pour multiple copies using a variety of thermoset materials.
Advanced Prototyping has made soft tooling to create prototype parts for aircraft, submarines, offshore oil rigs, cars, cell phones, toys, perfume bottles, milk containers, juice bottles, computers, blood pumps, tie clips, fishing lures, and many more products.