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 Injection Molds From Rapid Tooling...
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Detailed Rapid Tooling & Metal Parts Tutorial...
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Rapid prototyping systems can't yet produce parts in a wide enough range of materials, at a fast enough rate, to match anywhere near the entire spectrum of requirements of industry and science. Nevertheless, an increasing number of applications are taking advantage of additive fabrication and now incorporate parts that are directly made by RP processes. Today, typically these requirements are for low-volume items with complex geometries used in high value added applications such as medicine or aerospace. As materials and technologies have improved, and as the capabilities have become more widely understood, direct manufacturing has become a fast growing area in RP.
To address a wider range of applications sooner, RP is also often used as the starting point for making conventional fabrication processes faster, cheaper and better. Rapid prototyping is used in two ways to accomplish this: Molds may be directly fabricated by an RP system, or RP-generated parts can be used as patterns for fabricating a mold through so-called indirect or secondary processes.
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Indirect or Secondary Processes