Engineering
Tool & Component Design
We’ve been designing, machining and delivering thermoform tooling for 25 years and constantly reinvest in our capability to ensure we stay ahead.
We pride ourselves on:
- A fast and efficient service with short lead times
- Excellent design advice supported by component appraisal as part of our service
- Providing conventional tooling through to heated tooling, pressure form tooling and design to accommodate complex undercuts through moving core
- Extracting CAD data from all file types, turning them into high quality tooling
- Providing advice on cost efficiencies to make tooling fit for purpose and budget
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Our Tool & Component Design Services
We add a huge amount of value to our customers by taking on the design of components so they don’t have to. Sometimes that may be working from a sketch if a customer has an idea in their head but not the technical skills to turn it into CAD, or if we have a customer who is simply at capacity with their in-house team.
Whatever the scenario we have a team of highly trained and experienced designers who understand the plastics and polymers (e.g. polyurethane foam) to be able to predict problems down the line which need to be overcome early in the design phase. This saves a huge amount of time and cost down stream. We produce models that can then be taken on to use on any software which are clean and with excellent surfacing.
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This is an absolutely critical part of component and tooling design. We work collaboratively with our customers to understand the challenges and opportunities in how different materials are moulded and how that affects the component design. Our core understanding of moulding and tooling allows us to help customers to avoid costly issues with component design which are easy to fix early on in the design phase but harder to deal with when designs are frozen. We design all tooling ourselves with our in-house design team.
Almost anything is possible with tooling but the costs of achieving that dream can sometimes be prohibitive. Where we really cut our teeth is working with customers to come up with a cost-effective solution to make what seems impossible or at least impractical, possible, in their manufacturing environment.
We are well known amongst our customers for taking on some weird and wonderful projects that no one else would be crazy enough to have a go at – but we deliver. This is through a combination of energy and enthusiasm to see the possibility, backed up by experience and technical ability.
There are many times we’ve come up with a design solution to help a customer to do something they just didn’t think would be possible, whether that is some clever tooling, a modification to their process or some off the wall bespoke brain wave. They are all met with positivity, a healthy dose of reality and the follow through to make it happen.
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Through our scanning technology we frequently reverse engineer parts where tooling made by other providers has been lost or damaged, such as the below example of a project for a duct that was being converted from a blow moulding to vac tool:
- This part was 3D scanned, reverse-engineered, tool-designed, machined and vac formed all in house within 4 days
- The internal dimension were critical, involving careful offsets in CAD of the scanned external dimensions
- We scan smaller components using a Zeiss blue light scanner and move up to around 4m x 4m with a 7-axis Hexagon scanning arm
We can also reverse-engineer organic shapes such as pumpkins or lemons; to find out more head over to our confectionery section.
an overview of our Services
We have a long track record in working in the aerospace, automotive, mass transport, earth moving equipment and medical sectors. Geographically we have a wider customer base in the UK, Ireland mainland Europe and North America.
We can import all files and formats and daily work with STP, CATIA, XT and STL files. We run Powershape and Solidworks for technical CAD, and Geomagic Freeform for creative CAD (with haptic arm). We use Powermill for milling and Vectric for flat routing. In essence though we can take models from most formats and turn them into quality tooling, or create components from scratch.
We have 12 Hurco CNC machines - VMX30 (x2), 30s,
42i (x2), 50t, 50, 50i (x2), DCX 22i, VM10 and 10i; Romi d800; Maxicam M8 5 axis router/mill. We will shortly be commissioning a Roeders RXP501 HSM with 42K RPM spindle speed.
We can machine most metals up to 2200mm x 1600mm x 400mm 3 axis. Our 5 axis CNC can machine all model boards and some light aluminium work up to 2400mm x 1200mm x 500mm.
The vast proportion of our customers ask for Ureol/model board for prototyping and aluminium or steel dependant on the tooling. We work with a wide variety of model boards dependant on the application. Such is the volume of our purchasing for aluminium and model board we are very confident in our material costs on quotes and only charge a nominal handling charge on top. We do not mark up material costs.
Dependant on complexity of the job and capacity but we can go from receiving CAD data to delivery of tools and CNC fixtures in as little as 2 weeks, delivering ourselves where possible.
We’re accredited to ISO 9001 but see this as a baseline to improve from and set our targets for quality higher than the standard requires.
Who we work with…
Working alongside brands you know and love
We’ve helped the brands below with anything from creating parts for the next supercar, design a new plane seat or creating the next must-have chocolate. There’s never a dull day.
We’ve been designing, machining and delivering thermoform tooling for 30 years and constantly reinvest in our capability to ensure we
stay ahead.
Contact us today
We are always looking for our next challenge, so if you have a questions or have a project we could help with, please contact us via our contact form or one of the following methods:
Studio
Mushet Business Park, Coleford, Gloucestershire, GL16 8RD, UK
Ready to start your next project with us?
