Sheet Metal Soft Tooling Vs Hard Tooling

This is one of the disadvantages of hard tooling.

Sheet metal soft tooling vs hard tooling.

The tool s inserts are made using h13 or stavax harden to 46 54 hrc. Effective tooling ensures that manufactured products function properly extend the product lifecycle and make for a higher quality product overall. Silicone tools are good for 25 50 shots of a part before the soft tool must be retired. To summarize here are the main takeaways when comparing soft tooling and hard tooling.

Depending on tooling material and shape steel or aluminum tools cost are thousands or ten of thousand of us dollar. Soft tooling is appropriate for making prototypes or for fabricating a small number of parts typically less than 100. A major difference between the two processes is the type of tooling used to produce parts. The two most commonly used molding processes are urethane molding and injection molding.

They are prohibitively expensive for short run production. Tool life soft tools cannot compete with the durability of a hard tool. It can be adjusted to produce any shape and any set of dimensions that can be defined on an x y axis. Hard tooling is suitable for manufacturing a large number of parts typically in the thousands or even millions.

Inserts can be drill mill and grind using normal process of machining. The main advantages of soft tools are the low costs and quick turnaround time to cut the tool. An example is a plasma burning table. However the lead time to cut steel for a hard tool is longer than a soft tool due to the heat treatment process and the tight tolerances expected from hard tools.

Hard tools are usually rated for 1 000 000 shots and are very precise. Dimensional changes can be made via computer instruction with no new tooling required. The cost for hard tools is much higher than soft tools as well. Hard tools help to facilitate high volume production into the millions.

The tool life is guarantee up to 500 k shot. Converse to hard tooling soft tooling is flexible in what it can produce. The lead time of manufacture is shorter than hard tool. Hard tools are made of high quality steel and intended for larger mass production programs.

For prototyping medium or low volume production. The hard mold yields parts faster than soft tools do. For wax parts made from hard tooling an engineered wax or polymer is injected into a tool often an aluminium die to produce a wax reproduction of the part this wax part is slightly bigger than the final desired component to allow for contraction during the solidification process. Parts with simple.

Soft tools are generally made of composite materials. A hard tool can take weeks to complete whereas a completed end use cast urethane product can be produced in as little as five to seven days. It is important to utilize the correct process so that you receive properly functioning parts. The difference is that urethane molding produces parts from silicone soft tooling whereas injection molding produce parts from steel or aluminum hard tooling.

The tool s inserts are made of p20 or 718 pre harden steel. Along with it is the fact that hard tools are a lot more expensive than their soft counterparts.