From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design

Understanding resin-casting basics

From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design

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Understanding resin-casting basics

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Today we're at BGB Enterprises in Orange County, California. They're a manufacturer of different resin and molding compounds. And today we're going to be looking a few of the parts that can be made using the resin casting process. This part here is a very functional part that actually used on a real machine. You can see I've got some threaded inserts here and the bottom I've got different ribs. And its a very nice looking part and this is a functional part that can actually be used its not a prototype that we can only use as a sample. I can actually use this as a function part in the field on this machine and in fact I think this customer here uses this because they do very small production they maybe do 20 to 50 parts a year and it doesn't justify the cost of going to an injection molding tool. And it probably costs $10 to $20,000, where I've got probably only $1,000 or less in the tool to make this part, and I can produce a part probably within about an hour of time for each one. A couple other examples. Here's a clear part. This is more of a obviously not a functional part, but it's more a nice way to kind of see and vision the part. And I've got some parts over here that are showing that I have both a textured surface here as well as a clear. And it's coming directly out of the mold with that texture on and so makes a really nice part that that can be used without any extra processing. It's coming out perfectly out of the mold put on the machine. There's a bunch of different types of resins out there than can be used for these type of parts and from very, very soft resins to, to hard and opaque resins. You can change different color and a lot of different things. So a big variety of resins that can be used for the resin casting process. A couple of other parts here. This is a fender for a motorcycle. It's a flexible fender and it's functional. Put it on your motorcycle and go out for a ride. It's ready to go. We can do soft parts here, like little handles. They are, they are, they are flexible. They can push on. So again, usable parts directly out of the mold without any kind of extra processing. And even parts like this. This is a rotational casted so it's the same material as put into a, a mold and you, you roll it around and the material coats the inside of the mold and you get a, a hollow part like this. So a lot of different functionality. And this part here is a soft flexible material surrounding a harder plastic piece on the inside, again with some inserts and a lot of detail, some very, very intricate detail. Again, a functional part that can go out and, and be used in the field. Without, any extra processing done to it. And a lot of companies will go ahead and just use this for their manufacturing process. When they're in that low, that low intermediate stage between, maybe, 3D printing and injection molding. So in the rest of this chapter, we're going to go out, we're going to build a, a urethane mold, and we're going to start casting some parts for our production part that we, we generated ahead of time. So we're going to start with a, SLA part that we 3D printed, or an FDM part, we have a couple different samples we printed in both FDM, polyjet and SLA. The readings as our master, produce the mold for it, and start making parts.

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