Norck, a leading digital manufacturing company, provides extremely reliable, top quality, and fast sheet metal fabrication and sheet metal cutting services such as plasma cutting for a wide range of industries including aerospace, defense, robotics,  industrial, automotive, electronics, energy, hardware, and consumer products. Our team of highly qualified engineers and cutting-edge facilities will provide you with quality products with the quickest turnaround time at a competitive price. Whether you have high volume production projects or rapid protototyping needs, Norck can manage it with the results better than expectations.

Click here to get a quote for your next injection molding job and prototype molding.

Let’s now give you some insight how Norck achieves prototype molding.

There are mainly three toolings used for injection molding projects: prototype, bridge, and production tooling.

Prototype molding is used for a low-volume injection molding process to validate a design in terms of functionality, appearance, and assembly.

Its mold is made from aluminum or mild-grade steel, so it is cost-effective compared to a production mold. But it might wear quickly due to the soft material.

Prototype molding offers many advantages:

• Cost effective: Cost is reduced due to the prototype mold material (Aluminum/mild steel)

• Accurate parts: Prototype molds are ideal for prototyping, better than 3D printing, as it produces accurate details with conforming dimensions to the CAD models.

• Design validation:
Can help designers and clients decide on the shape, materials, finishings, features, gaps, and textures of a part before launching the production tooling

But there are some disadvantages as well:

   - Low volume production: Only one cavity can be made for each mold
   - Wears quickly: <500 shots
   - Limited modifications: Can’t be welded (adding material)

Prototype injection molding is made through four steps:

1. Plastification: The plastic granules are transferred from the hopper to the mold using a rotating screw and molted using heaters.

2. Injection: The screw will advance to increase pressure in the injection chamber to inject the molted plastic into the mold. The two cavities are maintained close until the plastic solidifies.

3. Cooling: After injection, the molted plastic will be cooled down to become solid using a cooling circuit. The screw will hold its position to hold the pressure inside the mold.

4. Ejection: After the molted plastic solidifies using a cooling circuit, the Die is opened, and the part is ejected via ejector pins. The screws will retreat to prepare for the next injection.

Obtaining a fully functional part might require extra processing for features that can’t be made with the Prototype molding process, such as taping. The designed part should follow Prototype molding design guidelines.

Norck, a leading manufacturing company driven by technology, high quality data and artificial intelligence, focuses on manufacturing excellent quality of sheet metal parts, custom parts and components, a wide range of 3D printed parts and moldings. It is a single source for a wide of range of companies around the world for their need of sheet metal fabrication, CNC machining, 3D printing, and molding. 

Besides its own production capacity, Norck’s ability access to a huge amount of manufacturing capacity of its top quality partners across Europe and the U.S allows it to provide its customers with low and high volume production, rapid prototyping and a wide range of manufacturing services from sheet metal fabrication to 3D printing.

Norck’s data-driven AI approach to manufacturing maximizes its overall product and service quality, while minimizing the overall cost of its parts and services. This leads to high quality products, better inventory programs for our customers worldwide, better visibility for supply chain management.

Norck’s team of manufacturing engineers, mechnical engineers, quality engineers, supply chain engineers, industrial designers, artificial intelligence engineers, data scientists, and software application developers work in a unique and coherent way to provide your company with high quality manufacturing parts and services, better design for manufacturability and all driven by data and artificial intelligence.

As a single source for all your manufacturing needs, Norck minimizes your overhead cost, diversifies your supply chain, improves your parts’ design for manufacturability, significantly improves the quality of services and parts you outsource, minimizes suppliers’ risks, improves your purchasing power, and provides the goods and services with a philosophy of just in time.