Rapid Prototyping Saves Ford Big Bucks

Ford Motor Co. (Dearborn, Mich.), one of the Big Three U.S. automakers, needed a faster, less expensive way to produce a part used on its production line. One of Ford's continuous needs is the production of dunnages - material handling parts used to hold bumpers and fenders in place as they are shipped between plants. Ford uses a variety of dunnages over the course of a year and typically spends up to three months creating the tooling needed for each variation.

Ford chose JP Pattern (Butler, Wis.), a prototype and production tooling service bureau, to work with a consortium of companies on this problem. The companies involved, which included Cemcon, Creative Techniques and Wisconsin Precision Casting, decided to apply rapid prototyping, an advanced manufacturing technology developed to automate new product development while shortening the product development cycle. The secret is that, rather than using conventional methods of fabrication, such as machine tools, to develop 3-D models and prototypes, the models are created in plastic or wax from a CAD design.

Ford provided a 2-D drawing of the dunnage, from which JP Pattern created a 3-D surface geometry CAD file. Using a rapid prototyping solution developed by Stratasys Inc. (Eden Prairie, Minn.), a prototype was created in investment casting wax. The wax model was then used to create ceramic shell molds.

According to JP Pattern, conventional methods of prototyping could have taken 3-4 weeks to produce the investment casting master; the rapid prototyping method took only a few hours. The cost of producing the tool was cut by half, at a 50% time savings.

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