Tooling Considerations

Vacuum form Molds, Cooling Fixtures and Trimming Fixtures

We advise that you take the time to blueprint your product before starting, so that all of the design aspects are thoroughly worked out before starting mold work.  CAD drawings will save you money in the long run for all but the most simple thermoforming jobs.  Depending on the quantity of a production run we only use either a high temperature 2 part mold material or aluminum.  We will only accept hardwood molds for low tolerance prototyping purposes, not for production purposes.  If you create your own wooden prototype mold we will use it to cast a production mold.   There are setup costs to make your prototype mold compatible with our equipment.  If you master your own prototype mold to save money and need to retool for a second prototype run you will incur additional setup costs.  So... it is indeed very wise to blueprint your product before tooling up.

In addition to forming molds, your product may require cooling fixtures and almost always trimming fixtures.  These tooling aspects are relatively low cost compared to the mold, but still a necessary.

After the tooling is complete there will generally be a prototyping stage and the post-forming fixtures do not always need to be made before prototype approval.  For straight forward bending jobs, cooling fixtures are not always required as we are equipped with temporary table fixtures that can be used for many simple designs.  Trimming fixtures are required for uniformity from part to part.

The lesson here is to plan your design carefully as tooling expenses can easily get into the thousands of dollars.  The mold pictured at the top of this page was one a two molds used to create the green carrying case on this web page.  This product also required cooling and trimming fixtures.  The total cost of tooling for this carrying case was in the $6500.00 neighborhood.  The aluminum mold in the second photo was about $1200.00.  The aluminum mold and other tooling required for this freestanding display for eye glasses (third from the top) was part of a modular system that could be used for several products and was about $12,000 overall.