Westec Plastics
Tammy Barras is leading a tour of the Westec Plastics toolmaking facility in Livermore, California.
As President of the company, it falls under Barras' remit to be hospitable to existing and potential customers, opening its doors and walking them through Westec’s manufacturing processes.
But today, she isn’t guiding a customer from one workstation to the next. Instead, it’s a group of coffee-making enthusiasts, who in 2008 set up an annual competition to recognize the best cup of coffee brewed with an AeroPress – a product manufactured with the help of Westec.
Somewhere between the CNC machining workspace and the final finishing area, a coffee fanatic remarks: “This is hard. Harder than making a cup of coffee.”
It is nothing Barras didn’t already know. Her morning coffee might take a couple of minutes to brew; the latest tool being designed and manufactured in Westec’s workshop will take weeks to turnaround, maybe even months.
At the end of 2022, though, the company stumbled across a potential means of reducing those lead times. It was at a trade conference in October that Barras was first introduced to Mantle’s TrueShape technology, which combines CNC machining with 3D printing to manufacture tooling components.
“I was blown away by the quality of the inserts that we saw,” Barras said. “It’s different than anything we had seen.”
This summer, Westec will install its first Mantle P-200 printer, accompanied by a F-200 furnace, which is powered by TrueShape. TrueShape deposits a flowable metal paste to build parts layer by layer before heat is applied to ensure the layers
are firm enough to be machined with a high-speed cutting tool every few layers. The process repeats to build the entire part, which is then placed into the F-200 to solidify the tool into a dense steel.
TrueShape has been designed to remove many of the steps of a conventional tool making process, saving time and allowing toolmakers to move quicker through product development with their customers. “With 3D printing, so many more fine features can be ‘roughed’ in which eliminates many hours of hard milling and electrical discharge machining (EDM) work,” Travis Meeks, Westec VP of Tooling, explained.
“We’re able to print the most complicated part of the job,” added Barras.
Post-print, a skilled toolmaker will likely have to fix the gates to the printed insert and cavity, take care of the threads and then polish the finer details of the part. But with the machining and EDM of the component largely cut out with TrueShape, Westec is expecting 75% of toolmaker’s typical workload to be removed, which is good news for its end users as they develop their products. Initially, Westec is targeting TrueShape at its medical customers. One medical diagnostic device has already been developed with a tool made using TrueShape. Another project is ongoing.
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“Oftentimes, [our medical customers] have to sample parts that are produced similarly to how they’re going to be used during production,” Barras explained. “We’re able to print an H13 or even a stainless-steel insert that will be a replica of what we would build for a production tool, and we could do that in two weeks instead of 10 or 12. When they’re doing design changes quickly, they take two weeks to design it, but they want their mold in a week. Everybody’s always asking how fast can you do things?”
Westec first used TrueShape in the development of a diagnostic device. Here, changes to the part forced work on the tooling to halt until the new design was validated. The company had been developing an eight-cavity tool, but quickly pivoted to produce a single cavity tool with TrueShape that matched the gating location, parting line, molding parameter and steel number requirements of the production tool to facilitate product iterations. When the design was confirmed, the details and dimensions were transferred to the production tool, allowing manufacturing to commence. For the printed inserts, only ten hours of additional finish work was needed, down from at least 35 hours with a traditionally manufactured counterpart.
Addressing design changes at this pace is not only set to appease the demands of its users, but also allow Westec to get to where it wants to be: production.
“Our business is based on production,” Barras finished. “We’re not necessarily making money on the tooling, it’s the production, and [when] the customer decides on what their product is, we can get into production. The sooner we get up and running, the better for Westec.”
