Vaccum casting is ideal for low volume manufacturing, but what's the procedures of implementation and how to manipulate the vacuum casting process in the China prototyping house to receive better result? Let's clarify it here with a briefing:
There are mainly 3 steps for the processing of the vacuum casting:
1.Master model: CNC machined a master model against 3D drawings, but do not make the master model with 3D printing.
2. Silicone tooling: melt silicone is poured around the master model and cured. Once it is dry, remove the master model to leave the cavity.
3. Casting: the melt resin is poured into the cavity to make production like replica.
And there are different types of silicone materials for the vacuum casting tooling (silicone tooling): clear silicone & translucent silicone, while the clear one is at higher price, bu it is quite helpful to improve the accuracy of the final product.
We can learn from above that here 2 main aspects to pay attention to:
Some other aspects we need to know about vacuum casting process:
Lifespan of the silicone tooling:The silicone tooling is a temporary tooling, there are production limitation & storage time limitation.
1. each tooling is available of making 10-20 products
2. better to make the production as soon as the silicon tooling is finished, otherwise, it is worried about the accuracy. Cause the silicone tooling is easily got deformed. We abandon the silicone tooling every 2 weeks and make new if there is following orders. That's why the sampling cost always high if we only make several pieces. In fact, the cost fee we charge for samples is barely half of the actual cost based on a long-term cooperation.