Jarod Rauch, B&J Specialty, IT & 3D Printing Manager with the 3D Systems ProX DMP 300.
A corn field in Indiana isn’t exactly the first place that comes to mind when thinking about technology, but B&J Specialty Inc., a 35-year old mould, die and build-to-print tooling provider, is showing that you can find innovation in the most unexpected places.
Founded as a small shop in a garage by a father and son team to meet the needs of local factories, B&J has grown into a family of organisations that’s always striving to be on the cutting-edge of technology.
“We have always been able to excel and succeed because we always look for technology to be the answer to how we make that next step,” Jarod Rauch of B&J Specialty Inc. told TCT. “We have seen so many tool shops in our area and in the industry, that don’t strive to improve, they just get used to doing things the way they’ve always done it and before you know it, they’re no more.”
B&J invested in a 3D Systems ProX DMP 300 metal 3D printer along with Cimatron mould design and 3DXpert AM software to enable them to create complex geometries and apply conformal cooling strategies into mould designs that would be impossible with traditional methods.
Mould design with conformal cooling channels created with Cimatron.
In the plastics moulding industry, cooling lines and circuits are typically the last thing to be incorporated into a design. Traditional methods of cooling a mould have been limited and inefficient, usually done by drilling intersecting holes throughout the geometry and often leading to defects such as warping, sink marks, and long moulding cycle times.
“When we build tools that do not have adequate cooling there is a lot of warping,” Rauch explained. “We have to build adjustment into our design knowing that after we get the sample part moulded, we’ll have to run it across our blue light scan machine and figure out how it is defected from the original geometry and then reverse that. With conformal cooling, I’m able to reduce a lot of that warpage so I can get a mould from build into production much faster.”
The cooling stage can take up over half of the overall injection mould cycle, so optimal cooling is vital. With metal 3D printing in-house, B&J is able to create moulds in maraging steel, which can be heat treated and machined, and design peak cooling passages inside a part which maintain a uniform distance between the moulding surface and cooling lines.
“If you take a high value mould that’s going to produce 2.5-3 million parts and you reduce five seconds per cycle off that – if you break that down, you’ve just paid wages for somebody for two years,” Rauch elaborated.
Metal 3D printed cores produced on the ProX DMP 300.
In some cases, the process has resulted in a 40% reduction in cycle times, 30% production rate increase, improved part quality and increased performance of the tooling itself. In one particular mould cavity test, a conventionally manufactured part had over 132-degree deviation in temperature which can be catastrophic for a plastic mould. With 3D printed conformal cooling passages, the part had only 18-degree temperature fluctuation across the cavity resulting in over 86% improvement in cooling.
Currently, AM has penetrated around 2% of B&Js business through not only conformal cooling applications but increased part complexity and removal of material with lattice structures. Rauch believes by educating customers and encouraging an open mind-set, that number can only continue to grow.
“I see that gaining and doubling and tripling, I would say hopefully in the next five years, if not sooner, because once we get one customer on board and their results start spreading throughout the moulding industry, other customers are going to jump on board.”
