Sand Casting, Master Pattern, Dies & Moulds
Long lead times for materials? Weekly supply cost increases? Labour scarcity? All these challenges characterise today’s pattern making world. Fortunately, a viable, proven solution exists to overcome these obstacles. Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) of extruded polymers on the Titan Robotics Pellet Extrusion System can produce patterns and core boxes in half the time at half the cost of traditional methods.
Foundries are adopting additive manufacturing solutions to address growing industry pressures that range from digitalization and the need for faster, more complex geometry patterns and moulds to foundry labour shortages. In the age of the digital foundry, these solutions offer streamlined manufacturing workflows with higher degrees of automation, improved operational efficiency, as well as significant time and cost savings.
Master Pattern
Traditional investment casting creating metal parts from a ceramic mould after a wax pattern has been burned away has been around for more than 5,000 years. Over the last century, the process has benefited from many innovations, but it is still slow and costly to create this kind of tooling for complex parts. Production time is typically measured in months and costs can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
From the testing and iteration stages to the end-use metal components production, we have developed advanced 3D printing solutions for scalable production of 100% wax or castable plastic patterns. These solutions offer a profitable way for foundries to achieve production-grade casted parts faster and more affordable than ever before, and to become increasingly responsive to customer requirements. Our digital foundry solutions eliminate the need for tooling to bring new agility and cost-effectiveness to investment casting pattern production and enable higher performing, more complex parts for casting in production volumes.
Dies and Moulds
Why using additive manufacturing to produce 3D printed moulds and tools? As an industrial production method, the 3D printing process of additive manufacturing offers enormous design and manufacturing freedom. The most complex of shapes can be designed and produced in the highest quality, quickly and cost-efficiently, even for small batch sizes. In this way, the process provides a solution to a tooling challenge faced by many tool and mould makers
The majority of plastic products in the world today are manufactured by injection moulding. However, fabricating moulds can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, moulds don’t always need to be machined out of metal—they can be 3D printed.
