Nowadays, the competition between enterprises mainly focus on product design, development circle of new products and the scale of product. As a key to the production of new product, the design and the production cycle of mold has become the determining factor for the development cycle of new product. It is generally known that the cost of mold production is very expensive, which account for 30%~40% among the cost of some product. An ordinary home appliance mold at least costs hundreds of thousands, some even more than 10 million, but the finished product may not be popular, which will result in great economic loss to the manufacturers, so many manufacturers tend to adopt prototype before developing the mold, thereby reducing the loss caused by the lack of market demand. The process is as follows: launching product- make prototype- participate exhibition- place an order- die sinking- finished product, so the prototype plays an indispensable role in launching product. Plus, the prototype can be used for design verification, product evaluation, analysis of process, making manufacturing tool, etc.
Currently, the method of prototype mainly has three kinds; manual prototyping,
CNC prototyping and rapid prototyping.
The traditional prototype has low efficiency, which is unable to competent for the prototype with complex surface. And it is very hard to guarantee the precision and shape, even cannot guarantee the coordination between prototypes. While currently advanced rapid prototyping because of its high precision and efficiency to be used, but due to the high cost of material and facility, it is difficult to popularize in small and medium-sized enterprise, which limit its application. The CNC prototyping with high efficiency, moderate cost and general facility is adopted by most of manufacturers.
