Vacuum Casting services
- Tight tolerance ± 0.01 mm
- Mass production capability
- delivery as fast as 1 day
Vacuum Casting service allows Prototool to make machine parts on demand. Vacuum Casting is a low-volume process for businesses looking for high-quality and consistent machine parts, fast at the lowest price by utilizing quick curing silicone molds and 3D printed master patterns. It is a process of three-dimensional printing a specific design to create a mold of silicone gel. The mold casts identical parts using Vacuum . Parts manufactured with this process require tooling, a master pattern, and Vacuum part material to create multiple copies of a part in a shortened timeframe, bridging the gap needed for high volume production.
Por qué elegirnos
Prototool is fully adept at handling your vacuum casting and silicone molding needs. With years of expertise in this field, we can mold your plastic parts to the most exemplary standard, cost-efficient, and fast turnarounds. It is an excellent method for making rigid or flexible parts and is ideal for high-quality prototypes. Vacuum casting parts can be made from a few to hundreds as required. You can choose our services since we provide:
The economy of scale
It is much cheaper in any volume, and an excellent low-budget alternative to other techniques since no expensive metal tooling is needed when dealing in small quantities.
Repeatability
If several copies of the part are required, vacuum casting is what you need.
Excellent surface finish
We produce generally less robust parts and has an excellent surface finish with durable parts and production-level quality and provides end-user, rigid, flexible, and rubber parts.
Fast lead time
We offer a wide range of solutions to help you develop an effective “master pattern” and scale up to production parts by letting our team commit to you to create and iterate at a much higher speed, which can be as fast as 1 day.
Cómo trabajar con nosotros
Here is the typical working order to expect when you hire us for our vacuum casting services:
Enviar solicitud
Submit request with a description and technical drawing of your product. In case of no technical drawing, no worries. We can reverse engineer.
DFM y presupuesto
Solemos responderle en un plazo de 24 horas.
Manufacturing
Once you approve the quote and make the deposit, we start working on the initial work of tooling, creating the mold etc.
Envío
Embalado, etiquetado y enviado a su puerta a tiempo
Get in touch with us virtually from anywhere in the world!
Free quoting, Quick reply within 24hrs.
What We Can Do
Master Pattern Made
Manufacture a master patterm according to your design file. Or you can just send us one product as master pattern.
Silicone Molding Making
Making silicone mold using the master pattern.
Parts Production
Get your parts for end-user testing or short-run production.
Material utilizado
There are so many different types of materials, depending on what properties you’re looking for. We consider the material properties, manufacturability characteristics, cosmetic appearance, and total cost when selecting a material. Advanced Formula Polymers have outdone themselves in vacuum casting. Additionally, Shore D vacuum is rigid, while shore A vacuum is elastomeric. Platinum-based silicone-based compression cast materials have also been in use. Vacuum cast materials divide according to their properties, surface finish, and applications, such as Rigid Polyurethane (Black, Natural, Color-Match), Rigid Clear Polyurethane (Colorless), Rubber-Like Polyurethane (Black, Natural, Color-Match), and Clear Rubber-Like Polyurethane (Colorless).
tolerance
The vacuum casting process’s tolerance range is +/-0.01 mm, and the tolerance range for each process type may be different. Likewise, injection molding tolerances are +/.005″ for the first inch and +/-.002″ for each inch after that. The tolerance value shows a standard deviation in vacuum casting parts. Tolerance ranges are available concerning the size of the designed machine part, surface finish, internal and external grow lines and quality, shrinkage rate due to thermal expansion, and distance dimensions. Metal inserts maintain tight tolerances in bores and crucial regions.
Finishing
Vacuum-Casted parts can be either rigid or flexible, even rubber-like, depending on the type of Urethane used. We offer Urethane in various color options: transparent (standard), black, and color matching. Parts may also have a standard, smooth, or custom finish, including adding hardware installations and painting. If surface finishes such as SPI and VDI surface textures are required, CNC machining the master pattern and finishing it is preferable. By spraying or painting the master pattern, we can produce surface textures like gloss and matt. The surface finish depends on the component post-processing. It is sometimes confined to the outside because some interior aspects of the design are impossible to reach.V
Industry application
The vacuum casting process is ideal for situations where a few parts are of high quality, precise, and have the performance characteristics required in production parts. Using premium grade urethane in custom formulations, we produce the highest quality of customized cast urethane parts and can also create prototypes from your drawings or sketches. The vacuum casting process and relatively inexpensive tooling make it easy and economical to make any design changes. The vacuum casting process can produce medical devices, housing and enclosures, sporting equipment, low-volume production parts, cases and covers, and prototypes. Some industrial applications of vacuum casting are:
- Engineering models
- Marketing test samples
- Pre-production runs
- Test prototypes
- Rapid prototypes
- Bridge to production
- Production of display parts
- User evaluation
- Consumer testing
- Low-volume manufacturing
- Concept models
- Sales samples
what is Vacuum Casting Service?
Vacuum casting is a production-quality manufacturing process for small or medium quantities of parts. It is similar to injection molding, but the tooling is soft and flexible rather than metal. Because of this, vacuum casting is much cheaper than injection molding, especially for low-volume production. It is a low-volume process for businesses looking for high-quality and consistent machine parts, fast at the lowest price by utilizing quick curing silicone molds and 3D printed master patterns.
Benefits of using our services?
Cast urethane molding offers a cost-effective alternative when you need multiple prototypes that provide production material performance or low volumes of production parts. The benefits you will get from our services are:
Cost-effectiveness: vacuum casting parts are usually more cost-effective in piece price than additive manufacturing when a more significant number of prototypes is needed. The vacuum casting process can continuously mold parts. Silicone molds are used to fabricate cast urethane pieces and are less expensive than aluminum or steel tools used in injection molding.
The flexibility of design: With urethane molding, soft tools or silicone molds are used to fabricate cast urethane pieces, which allows the flexibility to make design changes on the fly with customer feedback. Silicone molds only last a certain amount of shots (usually 25-30 per mold), so design changes can be implemented from mold to mold at minimal costs.
The lesser lead time of tooling: The tooling lead time for urethane molding is shorter, and vacuum casting can be ready in as little as one to two weeks, no matter the part size.
Surface finish: The strength and surface finish of cast urethanes can be custom colored, textured, and painted and will continue looking nice, even if they become scratched or damaged.
The spectrum of materials: There are hundreds of materials covering the range of vacuum casting by colors and specifications and can be custom-colored.
PREGUNTAS FRECUENTES
You can send us an email to the sales@prototool.com, or submit online form by sending us the following information about your project: material requested, number of parts, finishes, and 2D/3D master files in your possession. Upon receipt of these items, we will send you a quote as soon as possible.
Our typical molds are made from silicone and made in two parts, a core and a cavity. We create a three-dimensional master pattern, print it, and then complete the mold by pouring the silicone around the master after. The customer can also provide the master pattern. We can also produce tooling with Urethane and aluminum, depending on requirements.
Twenty-five parts per mold per cavity is a standard. More or fewer parts are possible depending upon the material and geometry.
Multi cavity molds are a good option for production prototypes. We can make multiple cavities of the same part in the same mold. Additionally, the same mold may contain various parts. Thus, the same material allows us to set up, pour the parts, and de-mold all the parts simultaneously.
Urethane is a great option when building up product demand before spending more cost on injection mold tooling.
