CMM fixtures, surrogate parts, degating jigs, and line-side tooling in engineering thermoplastics — and when the run is short, printed prototype mold tooling for your press. The support work your toolroom keeps getting pulled into, printed in days, so your mold people can stay on molds.
Your toolroom exists to keep molds running — maintenance, repairs, the work that actually stops a press. But every CMM fixture, degating jig, and check gauge in its queue spends that capacity on tooling a printer could have delivered overnight. The fixture isn’t expensive because it’s hard. It’s expensive because of what your toolroom isn’t doing while it cuts it.
Send the support tooling to us and the toolroom queue gets shorter where it counts — on the work only your mold people can do.
A program change, a new part number, a customer audit next week — support tooling shows up in days, not behind three mold repairs in the queue.
Polymer contact faces hold, present, and degate parts straight out of the press without marking a surface the customer will see.
These are published engineering case studies from the industrial FDM literature — their numbers, not ours. We cite them because the application is proven; we quote your tool in our materials, case by case.
12-cavity CMM inspection fixture, printed instead of machined. $1,500 → $200 in materials. 7–10 days → overnight. Thogus is a molder — this is exactly the class of tooling a molding plant burns toolroom time on.
Printed prototype mold tools in 24–48 hours for roughly $150, against 2–4 weeks and a $5,000 minimum machined. For low-volume runs the printed tool is the production tool — and a proof-of-concept in days wins bids that slow tooling loses.
Multi-cavity nests, check fixtures, and go/no-go gauges that present every cavity's part the same way, every time — the Thogus case is the class example.
Stand-in geometry for downstream trials, packaging checks, and assembly validation while real parts are still days away.
Part-specific nests that hold the shot for clean degating without marking the part.
Cooling nests, assembly aids, and point-of-use organization shaped to your exact parts.
Lightweight end-of-arm tooling for press-side robots. See robot EOAT →
Printed mold tools for your press: prove a part, bridge a short run, or demo a proof-of-concept while the steel mold is still a purchase order. Small tools only — sized to our 340 × 320 × 340 mm envelope, quoted case by case. Production molds stay steel.
Standard work runs PA12-CF and PA6-CF; polycarbonate where impact and clarity matter; PPS-CF where chemistry or heat gets serious. Anything bolted or clamped gets metal in the bolt path — heat-set inserts and compression limiters — so preload runs through steel, not creeping polymer.
And the mold question, answered plainly: your production molds stay steel. What we print is prototype and short-run mold tooling — small tools, low shot counts, quoted honestly against your resin, your pressures, and our build envelope. We’ll tell you no when polymer is the wrong answer — long cantilevers under sustained load, precision reference surfaces, anything where steel’s stiffness is the actual product. A tool that fails in your plant costs us more than the order.
A STEP file, a drawing, or a photo of the cavity part and how you’re checking it today. We’ll come back with price and lead time — typically same day.