Fathom
Cavity and core inserts
Fathom Manufacturing has used metal 3D printing technology from Mantle to reduce the time required to make a production injection mould tool for a medical device customer.
The complex nature of the tool’s cavity and core inserts would have traditionally taken Fathom over 200 hours of toolmaking operations across four and a half weeks to make the inserts.
Fathom says that with Mantle, it reduced its toolmaking operations to 110 hours, saving 45% of the time and produced the tool two weeks later.
The largest time savings came from eliminating CNC mill programming, rough milling and hard milling entirely. This reduced the EDM operations from 100 hours to 27 hours and also reduced the polishing time, freeing up Fathom’s mouldmakers to do other work.
The most time-consuming portion of toolmaking for Fathom was creating the cavity and core inserts that are used to form the plastic parts. Operators generally would program a CNC machine, soft mill the general tool shape, send the soft milled tools out for heat treatment, hard mill the heat-treated steel, program machines to create EDM electrodes, operate sinker and wire EDM machines to produce fine details that cannot be milled, and polish the inserts before assembling them in a mould base.
Fathom needed to create inserts for a medical device customer that was ramping up production. To mould the intricate device, the inserts needed deep ribs and many small features that could not be machined easily. The 200 of hours of work that previously went into the production would include 100 hours of EDM work. Such extensive EDM made polishing difficult because EDM hardens the steel.
Fathom used Mantle 3D printing technology to produce inserts in H13 steel that the company states had the accuracy, surface finish and fine features that were close to the requirements of the production tool. The printing of the fine features allowed Fathom to not perform any rough milling before sending printed inserts out for heat treatment.
“We didn’t even notice that the parts were printed when we were moulding, we put thousands of PSI into the part, and it moulded just fine, no flashing or anything,” said Dale Christensen, Manager of Engineering, Fathom.
No hard milling of the features was required when the inserts returned. Fathom stated that only 27 hours of EDM operations were required to touch up the fine features, which was a reduction of 73 hours from what was previously used.
Earlier this month, Mantle announced the launch of its P20 3D printing system to simplify toolmaking, accelerating the manufacturing cutting of moulded parts.
