Ehren-Haus
We have seen substantial growth in plastic production and plastic prototyping in the last few decades. What exactly is plastic prototyping anyways? Plastic prototyping is a technique of creating a dummy or fascimile of a plastic product to envision how the final product will work in a real-time environment. Prototyping is not new to the industry, however, plastic manufacturing processes like injection molding, plastic sheet forming, plastic CNC, etc crucially demand prototyping. CNC machining, plastic forming, continuous casting, etc are calculative manufacturing processes. Miscalculations can lead to whole manufacturing runs to fail Quality Control. Which of course leads to a repetition of production cycles and additional costs. Therefore custom plastic prototyping is commonly utilized by several industries to avoid product failures.
Is that all? No, there’s more to it. With this post, we will provide you many reasons why to prototype plastic products and how they may meet your production requirements.
Plastic prototyping offers several benefits, which have been best utilized by plastic manufacturers across the world to build highly functional plastic products.
• It Helps in Visualizing Final Products:
Although several advanced software tools enable you to visualize and simulate plastic products, that is often not enough. Plastic prototypes help understand key design elements from the aesthetics to dimensional points of view. Creating either functional or dummy prototypes can help in visualizing the final product. Generally, custom products with additional and unusual features are difficult to make acurrate predictions with respect to their real world aesthetics and functionality. In such cases, a prototype works as a replicate and provide pre-manufacturing reference.
• It Refines Product Design and Development Cycle:
Prototyping is the second step of the product design and development cycle after design and conceptualization. If any miscalculation has taken place within the design stage a huge error might occur in the final product without utilizing a prototype,. If any error is detected at the final stage, then designers may need to repeat the whole design and development cycle to resolve the issue. In the cases that a bulk production cycle is adopted, then the same error occurs in all the products which can lead to huge losses. Prototyping helps identify any such errors and rectify them before bulk production to avoid a final product recall.
• It Helps in Testing Functionality of Final Products:
Plastic prototyping is essential for functionality testing before actual manufacturing. Like all other types of materials, plastic products can have both static or mobile components. Static components or products can be easily tested on CAD software prototype modeling. However, when it comes to choosing plastic prototypes for fully functional products, most designers go for functioning and physically manufactured prototypes. It helps in testing the product for component interconnection, load endurance, chemical tolerance, etc. Therefore, custom plastic prototyping is essential to ensure the product’s performance without failure.
• It Saves Time and Cost of Production:
By choosing plastic prototypes, errors in design and manufacturing can be avoided. Therefore, it saves time of final product manufacturing and failure as well as the time of product cycle modification post-failure. When it comes to choosing a development method, designers often opt for the least costly prototyping method, a plastics prototype. In contrast, proceeding without a prototype, the cost of raw material, production, resources for a failed product at the final stage is a huge industrial-economic loss. During the prototyping, if one fails to perform up to expectations, then the design for the manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) cycle is modified and errors are rectified before the final production, this certainly saves time and money for plastic manufacturers.
• Increases Trust in End Users:
Manufacturers often use prototypes to pique the curiosity of their customers and investors. Choosing plastic prototypes to present an idea to potential customers can be beneficial in several cases. Customers can test the product functions and features on the prototype and place bulk orders based on the quality and functionality. It certainly helps improve trust in end users.
Now that you have a strong idea of the importance of custom plastic prototyping, consider sourcing prototyping services from trusted manufacturers. Ehren-Haus is one of the leading plastic fabricators and manufacturers that offers custom prototyping services. They have been an active participant in plastic manufacturing for over 35 years. Their professional services and expert advice for custom plastic production can be beneficial to your business.
