Metal Durable Tooling

Manage Heat Dissipation, Achieve Uniform Cooling, Reduce Warping and Deformation While Achieving better Overall Injection Molding Economics

22%

cycle time reduction

30 hrs

reduction in mold post processing time

18%

reduction in tool cost

Deliver Advanced Product Innovation with Higher Productivity, Higher Quality, and Shorter Lead Times

Traditional manufacturing methods often force engineers to make tradeoffs between tooling costs, part quality, and manufacturing lead times. Nevertheless, complex geometries that could improve these factors are either too difficult or too costly to implement.

Our metal additive manufacturing solutions overcome this challenge with an innovative set of tools and processes for managing every aspect of metal durable tooling. The combination of comprehensive software solutions, exhaustive process knowledge, and advanced metal 3d printing equipment and materials technologies enable you to leverage complex die inserts, apply high productivity conformal cooling, produce precision jigs and fixtures and quickly iterate on complex tools like tire molds.

Solve Your Metal Durable Tooling Challenges

Improve Tool Productivity and Part Quality

Thermal stresses on tools and hot spots can significantly degrade tool performance and part quality. However, the ability to define more complex tool features improves thermal management, thus improving the quality, productivity, and uptime. Our durable tooling solution provides the freedom including innovations like conformal cooling to optimize tool design beyond what traditional tool making processes allow.

Increase Product Design Freedom

Complexity exponentially increases the cost and time required to develop, produce, and deliver traditional tools. Constraints surrounding features such as draw directions, cooling channels, parting lines, and draft angles often produce significant limitations on the innovation of parts. Our durable tooling applications remove these traditional manufacturing constraints, giving you the engineering freedom to optimize automotive parts and systems.

Deliver Early Design Iterations More Frequently

When designing advanced automotive systems, you can use design iterations to refine and optimize performance. Physical testing, together with digital models, also provides the ability to launch products with confidence. Our solutions for metal 3D printing durable tooling enable you to significantly reduce the lead time for early physical design drafts, allowing more time for iteration, testing, and validation.

Apply Best-in-Class Digital Solutions

Our durable tooling solution provides you with software for developing and validating advanced tool designs. This software enables conformal cooling channel design, scanning, inspection/metrology, and process control solutions so that engineers and designers can efficiently innovate their metal durable tools. Our solution for durable tooling has been developed with input gathered from years of engagements and incorporates best practices from leading companies and innovative industries.

Application Innovation Group

Our team can help you solve your most difficult design and production challenges with additive manufacturing solutions. Together we’ll identify your needs, working with you to optimize your designs, prototype, validate and define a manufacturing flow.

Find out more

More Automotive Applications

Energy/Fluid Management (Metals)

Manufacturing Aids

Air and Fluid Handling - Automotive

Body Interior and Trim

Case Study - B&J Specialty Increases Production Rate by 30% with Metal 3D-Printed Conformally-Cooled Injection Mold

Find out how B+J leveraged 3D Systems metal printing solutions to increased productivity of injection molding of an automotive duct by reducing the cooling cycle time by 33% and temperature variation across cooling by 86%.
Webinar – Confomal Cooling - Overcoming Injection Molding Design Challenges with Powerful CAD/CAM Software and Direct Metal Printing

Analyze the benchmarking results delivered by Bastech that prove the advantages of conformal cooling leveraging 3D Systems technology with significant improvements in cost, productivity and quality.