Tooling
Rapid tooling was one of the first, if not the first, important application for rapid manufacturing. After all, tooling is a low-volume, highly-customized product and engineers were early to see the potential benefits. As with many other RM applications, rapid tooling illustrates the ambivalence of today's state of the art: On the one hand, rapid tooling can provide dramatically shortened fabrication time while lowering costs. In high-value applications such as the fabrication of injection molds, typical savings cited are in the 10% to 25% range, and literally months can frequently be taken off the time to obtain parts. Advanced injection molds can also be fabricated with conformal cooling channels and using multiple and/or graded materials to further improve thermal and wear characteristics. These enhancements, unique to additive fabrication, typically lead to a 20 to 30% increase in throughput for a mold.

On the other hand, rapid tooling still usually requires hand or CNC finishing to compensate for inadequate finishes and details. Frequently required secondary operations such as sintering and infiltration can be time-consuming and messy rather than "digital" or modern. In addition, no rapid tooling technology is yet capable of producing truly high volumes of parts because of material choices and characteristics.

The threat of additive rapid tooling spurred improvements in high speed machining, which have made subtractive CNC techniques more competitive over time. Also, over the decade or more of RT's development, much work has been moved from the US to lower-cost off-shore locations, greatly offsetting economic incentives.

More refinement and simplification has also been brought to a major application area of RT, injection mold fabrication. Today some vendors provide so-called rapid injection mold (RIM) services based on conventional technology that a few years ago were solely on rapid tooling's radar screen. There are some limitations on RIM technologies, but these are being overcome and vendors can provide customers high volumes of parts in final materials, very quickly, and with very low tooling expense.

Ironically, the rise of rapid manufacturing - which does away with need for tooling altogether - will provide further disincentives for rapid tooling. As a result of these forces, rapid tooling remains a small slice of the entire tooling fabrication pie. Its future depends to a great extent on the unique advantages it can provide to make sophisticated advanced tooling that can be made no other way.