Tooling is the second most application of Additive Manufacturing. The high initial costs make the traditionally manufactured injection moulding tools feasible only for high volume production.

 

In most cases, businesses don't have the technology to produce the injection mould tooling so they outsource if they go for traditional manufacturing technologies. It takes almost a month or more to produce an injection mould tool with traditional manufacturing technologies. With the help of additive manufacturing technology, they can bring it in-house for such tooling.

 

For low volume production like 1 to 100 parts, production Additive manufacturing is best because it eliminates the high initial costs involved in machining those metal parts, grinding them to achieve dimensional accuracy and maintenance of those parts.

 

Additive Manufacturing completely eliminates high initial costs, time,  and maintenance. DMLS and SLM can produce metal parts of strong, highest accuracy and precision at a very faster lead time.

 

 

There are case studies that shown that by implementing additive manufacturing, the cost is reduced by 50-95% and lead time by 30-80%.