Pinpoint accuracy

A UK rapid tooling technology company has developed a production process that can create injection moulded components, such as customised car parts, without machining by using arrays of precision placed pins.

is using a variant of its Subtractive Pin Tooling process that has drastically reduced time and cost for manufacturing components such as military body armour.

The system works by raising arrays of precision pins to create the front face of the tool, and with little or no machining it can produce final specification injection moulded components. 'It's a hybridised additive and subtractive technology,' explained Surface Generation chief executive Ben Halford. 'A CAD file is processed to provide data to move the pins into the desired shape, and this can either be used directly as an infinitely reconfigurable mould or we skim the top of the pin array by milling to create an exact surface.'

After use, the pin bed can be reformatted for the next job. And if a shape needs modification or the surface is damaged, the affected region can selectively be re-formed in the bed in minutes. 'It's fundamentally the same technology platform we've been using for three years, but we've increased the pin precision and tolerance and the material specification,' said Halford.