Injection Molding Made Easy

Injection molds shouldn't take months to get...

• Production Quotes in 1 - 3 Business Days. Tooling and Samples in 5 Weeks or Less.
• Design, Engineer, Prototype and Manufacture All in One Place.
• Full Expedited Production Orders in 4 Weeks or Less.
• Get the Best Price and Quality Plastic Parts With RapidMade.

RapidMade Advantages Include:

• Design and production for embedded stock and custom components including: Circuit boards, lights, mechanical components, clear windows and magnifiers, locks, springs, fasteners, and much more.
• Extensive experience prototyping and testing precise mechanical assemblies.
• In house assembly for complicated projects.
• One stop design, prototyping and manufacture limits exposure to risk between suppliers.
• Streamlined development brings your product to market faster.
• Iterative testing with customer approval every step of the way ensures you get the product you envisioned.
• Hundreds of available mold finishes and textures.
• Wide range of standard plastics options including ABS, Polycarbonate, Nylon, Polyethylene, Polypropylene and composites. Custom plastics available on request.
• Over 70 years of engineering and manufacturing experience will exceed your expectations.

Skill Gap Recognized as Challenge to Additive Manufacturing

BY THE NUMBERS

17.4 million: Jobs supported by manufacturing in the United States

12: The percentage of manufacturing in the nation's GDP

$77,000: The average salary of manufacturing workers

$60,000: The average salary of entry-level manufacturing engineers

17: The percent of Americans who view manufacturing as a viable career choice

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology, courtesy of Orange Count Register

My parents and brothers own a small box-making plant in Pittsburgh. When I was young, we would play in the scrap piles, sweep the floors, and do odd jobs to pass the time while our parents worked.  Because of this unique experience - and because Pittsburgh was a major steel producer - I knew that manufacturing was a good career choice - if you could get the work.  Unfortunately, it earned a bad reputation in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as more companies offshored and consolidated their production facilities.  I myself left the field to teach when I had to oversee Nabisco's Pittsburgh plant closing.

This experience is one reason I'm very excited about Additive Manufacturing (3D printing).  It uses advanced technology, requires high-skilled labor and conserves raw materials... things I hope will attract another generation of U.S. makers... but first, this generation will need to learn the skills required to design, scan and make 3D printed prototypes, parts, tools and models. Increasingly, schools, like some in Orange County, recognize the importance of ensuring enough workers have those skills.

According to Orange County Register reporter Tomoya Shamira, the Dean of the UC Irvine School of Engineering Dr. George Washington describes his students' experiences,

"Students at UCI receive training in a host of additive manufacturing technologies such as selective laser sintering and stereolithography."  

And this is fueling an interest in manufacturing... 

"CI engineering professor Marc Madou said 3D printing is helping young people become interested in manufacturing, partly because they can turn their design into a physical model quickly."

But not all jobs will require an engineering degree which highlights the need to partner with local community colleges as well...

"While advanced technologies are changing the manufacturing landscape, there’s growing demand for experienced welders and machinists as U.S. companies are bringing their manufacturing back home. Two-thirds of manufacturers said they couldn’t find qualified workers, according to a survey conducted by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte Consulting."

 

4D Printing

Advances in 3D Additive Manufacturing technologies are far too often attributed to advances in the actual 3D printers themselves, but the machines are only 1/3 of the equation.

Often times new, innovative materials and software can have an even more profound impact on available products in the industry, or in this case, any industry.

The U.S. army just invested $855,000 in multiple projects around the development of "4D printing" software. Don't let the name fool you. The structures are created using the same 3D printing techniques on the market today, but this software allows for fundamental alterations in part design that allow the final construction to be completed after the part has been created.

By making parts out of hundreds to thousands of little, jointed components we can take advantage of new properties resulting from complicated assemblies. Additionally, we can now create objects that would have originally been too large for the relatively small beds of 3D printers.

These complicated assemblies would be far too labor intensive and costly to manufacture using any other technology available today.

Useful examples would include the dress in the video which behaves differently as we vary the size and placement of the joints throughout the dress's structure. We could also create very large objects previously compressed which snap into place to create a rigid, permanent structure much larger than the compressed one.

A lofty goal of this software would be to fabricate large objects on site in remote locations, like on an air craft carrier or on a colony in space where real estate for such equipment may be at a premium.

The beauty of Additive Manufacturing is that the users see new capabilities such as 4D Printing and come up with their own amazing applications.

3D Printed Casts

The technique is antiquated and could use a little something of a shake up thanks to new technology.

Setting castings in plaster is centuries old and has a variety of uncomfortable problems. Scanning and imaging of the body are common place in the medical field in order to diagnose injuries and illnesses, but the ability to create prosthesis and custom fixtures directly from those scans is brand spanking new, from printed bones and teeth implants to entire artificial limbs. The parts either fit to the contours of your body or are exact replicas of the body part which they replace. 

This technique now produces a superior cast taken directly from a 3D scan of the broken body part and 3D prints a cast from the digital negative. The cast is designed with snap fits which enclose the arm, keeping it from moving, but making it accessible to air and hands. Much more comfortble.

Just another simple example where the medical field can benefit from applying new technologies (additive manufacturing/3D printing) to ones that are already pervasive in the medical field (3D scanning and imaging.)

Bentley Uses 3D Printing to Design Vehicles

Bentley makes to scale models in hours instead of weeks to validate designs and increase time to market.  

“We can simulate what a car is actually going to look like and show our bosses absolute reality.”

 – Kevin Baker, Design Model Manager.

This  helps speed up the approval process and make sure the concept of the design is perfect before investing too much time and money in working on flawed individual components.

Check out the video below and remember that you don't have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment to get the same models and prototypes that Bentley makes in house if you contact RapidMade!

A Great Infographic Breakdown of the 3D Printing Market

Everybody loves infographics, almost as much as they love 3D printing. Combine the two and you get a pretty concise look at some important metrics in our field, like what technologies and service bureaus people use, the make-up of professionals in the field, and why people use 3D Printing.