How to Lower Tooling Costs Without Compromising Quality
Save Money with These Tooling Tips
Your tooling choices have a significant impact on your costs, product margins, and competitiveness in the market. Therefore, it is important to analyze the potential return on investment of your tooling. Luckily, there are a few strategies you can use to optimize your tooling costs, which puts more money into your pocket.
Take a Look at Your Design
Does your tooling design have unnecessary features? Cosmetic enhancements, like textured surfaces or high mold polishes, can make your product look better but will increase the price. Reducing these unnecessary features can lower your costs on tooling.
You should also ensure that your tooling is designed for manufacturability. Having tooling that is optimized for efficient manufacturing will save you time and money. An experienced tooling manufacturer can help you do this by identifying potential issues and modifications that can simplify your tooling and lower cost.
Use Cost-Effective Materials
Take a look at the materials you are using for your tooling. Many popular part production processes will require extremely durable materials like steel. With the durability to withstand high temperatures and pressures involved in the manufacturing process, it makes sense that steel is used for many tooling applications. However, if you are using low-temperature and low-pressure processes — like reaction injection molding (RIM) — you can use aluminum, which is more affordable than steel.
Use Secondary Processes to Improve the Lifespan of Your Tooling
Tooling can be expensive, and you want it to have the longest lifespan possible. When creating your mold, look into ROI-enhancing services like heat treating and cryogenic treatment.
- Heat treating involves heating the metal until its microstructure changes. Then, it is rapidly cooled which hardens the metal and increases its durability. Altering this microstructure can also alter the metal’s corrosion resistance, magnetism, heat, and electrical conductivity depending on the tool’s application.
- Cryogenic treatment uses cryogenic temperatures that generally sit below -238 degrees Fahrenheit to strengthen and enhance the grain structure of metal tooling. This treatment reduces the number of weak points in the metal and decreases the chance of failure when in use.
Adding these secondary treatments can dramatically improve the lifespan of your tooling, increasing your return on investment by giving them improved resistance to wear during use.
Consider Your Tolerance Specifications
Certain industries, such as the aerospace and automotive industries, need to meet tight tolerances for their tooling to increase the safety of the entire operation. However, tight tolerances also come with a cost. If you are in an industry that doesn’t necessarily need tight tolerances, you can relax your specifications.
Work with an Experienced Tooling Manufacturer
Working with an experienced tooling manufacturer can help you optimize your tooling and lower your costs. Our heat treating capabilities increase tooling durability, creating superior, longer-lasting tooling. We also have the ability to strengthen your tooling through cryogenic hardening, which reduces the weak points in the tooling, preventing it from failing.
At Pivot Precision, we have the capability to deliver short lead times on complex, tight-tolerance, and highly specified tooling. With Swiss turning, CNC milling and lathing, heat treating, and cryogenic hardening, we can handle all of your product needs. Our extensive manufacturing capabilities and our ISO-certified shop allow us to reduce lead times, provide high-quality tooling to various industries, and maintain customer satisfaction standards.
Contact our team to see what we can do for you.