The Importance of Custom Tooling

Custom tooling in manufacturing refers to specialized tools and other equipment designed and made specifically for certain processes or products. These could include cutting tools, dies, fixtures, gauges, jigs, molds, or other equipment components. Custom tooling is often used when standard tooling won’t meet a manufacturer’s needs. This could involve fabricating a new mold to produce a product with a distinctive design or geometry, or it could be a component customized to secure a workpiece in place during a machining process.

In essence, the process of tailoring tooling involves making a unique tool for manufacturing a specific product or performing a particular procedure. Fabrication of custom tooling is expensive, however, as it involves more than just fitting the tool into a machine. It requires careful planning to design specialized implements that ensure that industrial equipment performs as desired when manufacturing a certain product.

Why Custom Tooling is So Important for Modern Manufacturing

Creating custom tooling is a common practice for many manufacturers. Tailored tools are developed to ensure better quality control and efficiency, while also reducing costs and waste. Customization of these implements also allows solutions that are more finely attuned to the user’s needs than conventional approaches. For example, custom tooling allows parts manufacturers to more effectively make unique or specialized components that are required only in smaller quantities. Prototyping is another area in which custom tooling is often used, as it saves time and expense during product development. Custom tooling is particularly useful in three fabrication methods: injection molding, composite fabrication, die manufacturing and CNC (computer numerical control) machining.

Custom Tooling for Injection Molding

Used for efficient mass production of parts and products, successful fabrication of accurate and high-quality products with injection molding techniques entails the utilization of the right tooling. Using custom tooling helps ensure greater precision and consistency in the end product. Part development teams use custom tooling to ensure exact specifications are met while also increasing production efficiency. The use of customized tools in injection molding projects reduces costs, defects and lead times while creating better quality products.

The tools used in this sector generally refer to molds and their components like cavity inserts, cooling channels, ejector pins, sprue bushings and other parts. It also refers to clamping, injection units, hot runners and nozzles, and auxiliary equipment like dehumidifiers, dryers, hoppers, loaders, and temperature controllers. Custom tooling even extends to quality control implements, such as calipers, coordinate measuring machines, micrometers, and testers for surface roughness.

Using custom tooling for injection molding offers advantages that include: 

• Accuracy: Custom tooling enables precision control over the geometry and size of final products, ensuring better consistency.
• Cost: While high development costs can make manufacturers think twice about custom tooling, over time it will in due course result in savings, as molds can be reused over and over again.
• Flexibility: Though making a customized implement is difficult, custom tooling can be designed to adjust to wider range of specifications.
• Quality: Custom tooling makes it easier to ensure specifications like consistent coloring, dimensional accuracy, standardized wall thicknesses, and uniform texture for final products.

Meanwhile, there can be a few drawbacks to using custom tooling for injection molding. Initial costs will be higher, as developing unique implements requires a company invest considerable time and expense in their design, prototype and testing phases. There’s also less flexibility, as implements are made for specific products or projects. Regular maintenance becomes even more important as well, as it’s far more difficult to produce another custom-built tool than buy one off-the-shelf. Additionally, it can make it more difficult to change vendors injection molding tooling transfers.

Custom Tooling for Fabrication of and with Composites 

General steps for developing custom tooling for composites involve: 

• Consultation: Normally the development of custom tooling begins by consulting with the toolmaker’s engineering team so that both parties understand the challenges, objectives and prerequisites involved. Collaboration offers the best opportunity for creating tailored solutions to meet a customer’s distinctive needs for a project, which requires effective communication.
• Conceptualizing design: Once the initial consultation is done, the designers and engineers work closely with a customer to convert these ideas into something tangible. This will often involve brainstorming sessions by an experienced design team, who will utilize advanced software to develop a model that will function appropriately, which can then be manufactured easily.
• Manufacturability: Designing custom tooling for this sector requires extensive knowledge of composite manufacturing. In this phase, the team will seek to optimize the design for production so that the implement and the product for which it will be used are made precisely and cost-efficiently, with a nod to the project’s scalability.
• Specifications: Developing the design details requires continuous refinement, but at this stage it’s more about improving the design to the point that it can become more than just a digitized model on a computer screen. Thorough thought goes into component integration, material selection and structural integrity of the design during this phase.
• Prototype development: A physical model is then developed, along with any fixtures, molds or other equipment needed to ensure consistency when full-scale production begins. This is where design meets tooling requirements for streamlining the manufacturing processes.
• Testing: Once the design has gone through all these phases, it’s time for the engineering team to test the custom tooling to ensure it performs as it should. At this point, the custom tooling will undergo analysis, with assessments that often include physical testing and finite element analysis to verify the tools meet specifications and industry standards.
• Novel materials are especially prone to needing new types of implements, as advanced composites can prevent challenges for more conventional tools. Though molds for advanced composites are often required, these are different than the injection molds used in custom tooling for injection molding applications. Additionally, custom tooling can include implements for bonding, curing, cutting, finishing, forming and shaping, along with infusing resins into composite materials.

Custom Tooling for CNC Machining

The use of custom tooling allows components to better meet tighter tolerances, ensuring stringent specifications while reducing errors and waste in the process. This in turn enhances productivity, with tools developed to increase the rate at which material is removed, lowering production times in the process. This then translates to cost savings, as custom tooling is often designed to extend the life of an implement and improve a machine’s uptime.  

Altering CNC tooling to handle certain applications better allows cutting machines to make intricately designed parts that standard tools are unable to achieve. Custom tooling can also be designed for difficult-to-machine materials, like titanium, hardened steels or certain composites. Secondary finishing operations can also benefit from custom tooling, resulting in smoother finishes. This also supports greater design flexibility and overall innovation by allowing rapid prototyping and fabrication of lower production runs.

Ultimately, custom tooling gives manufacturers a competitive advantage over competitors that stick with standard tools. It augments their capabilities, boosts efficiency and generally leads to quicker turnaround times. Custom tooling improves the quality of components while also reducing the number of changeovers needed, reducing the time it takes to machine parts. Custom tooling can even extend tool life through producing more robust designs and utilizing tougher materials.

Applications for Custom Tooling

Custom tooling is used by manufacturers across many industrial sectors to enhance efficiency while augmenting accuracy, extending tool live, reducing production times and otherwise positively influence manufacturers’ bottom lines.  

Applications in which custom tooling is often used include: 

• Aircraft components for fuselages, landing gears, turbines and other systems.  
• Assembling precision bearings, gears and other parts for heavy industrial machinery.
• Circuit boards, connectors, microchips, and other minuscule electrical components.
• Creating custom fixtures, jigs, and other parts to augment automated processes.
• Enhancing efficiency for oil and gas applications by making drill bits and other equipment used within the industry.
• Ensuring turbine components and other parts for power generation are sufficiently durable.
• Fabricating surgical instruments like forceps or scalpels.
• Machining camshafts, gears, pistons, and other intricately shaped vehicular components.
• Making bridges, crowns, and other orthodontic structures for dental applications.
• Manufacturing plastic exterior and interior components via injection molding.
• Molding orthopedic and prosthetic devices to fit the patient’s body exactly.
• Precisely fabricating battery enclosures for electrical vehicles.
• Producing components for armored vehicles, weapon systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other military equipment.
• Shaping composite materials for military aircraft to enhance stealth capabilities.
• When standard tools can’t achieve the results, manufacturers in many industries look to custom tooling.

Custom Tooling from Spaulding Composites

The engineers at Spaulding Composites Inc. have the capabilities to tailor tools to meet our customers’ applications, especially regarding custom tooling for injection molding. Our lengthy history of fabricating injection molded parts with complex geometries and extensive work with advanced composite materials makes Spaulding an ideal partner for customers requiring custom tooling. Additionally, our CNC machining capabilities enable us to achieve tolerances to +/- 0.002 inch (50.8 microns). To learn more about custom tooling and how we can assist with your project, contact Spaulding today.