{"id":1433,"date":"2007-12-12T15:42:48","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T20:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ulprospector.com\/knowledge\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2018-02-09T14:06:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-09T20:06:07","slug":"pe-playing-safe-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ulprospector.ul.com\/1433\/pe-playing-safe-plastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing it Safe with Plastic Prototypes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Protomold<\/a> – Nobody’s Faster In The Short Run.\u00ae<\/p>\n

The whole purpose of plastic prototyping is to allow yourself the option of tweaking your model\u2014thickening a wall, adding a rib, placing text or a logo\u2014before locking in a final design for production. For injection molded plastic prototypes<\/a>, tweaks can entail the creation of a whole new mold. A new mold may be quite affordable if your prototypes are being made by Protomold, but if the change can be made by modifying the existing mold your cost will be lower still.<\/p>\n

There’s one critical fact to remember if you want to be able to modify your part by modifying the original mold. It is relatively easy to remove metal from an existing metal mold. Adding metal, on the other hand, can be difficult or, for all practical purposes, impossible with rapid injection molding. To look at this from the part perspective, you can add plastic, but you can’t take it away.<\/p>\n

Designing with this in mind is called “steel safe” or “metal safe,” and doing so can save you both money and time when you have to modify your design. For example:<\/p>\n