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4. Rapid Tool ProductionRapid Prototyping & Manufacturing TechnologiesOnly when the production quantity is massive that the expensive tooling cost canbe justified. As a result, the way of how to produce tooling quicker and moreeconomically especially for small batch manufacturing becomes a big concern.Furthermore, in the product design and development process, there is always inneed of some intermediate tooling to produce samples for marketing, functionaltest, or production process planning and evaluation purposes. In this respect, RTis the ideal mean to fit the needs.Rapid Tooling (RT) is the result of combining Rapid Prototyping techniques withconventional tooling practices to produce small quantity of plastic or metalcomponents from electronic CAD data directly or indirectly. Direct RT technologysuch as Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) which fabricate production toolingfrom CAD data whereas Room Temperature Vulcanization (RTV) silicone rubbermould is the most commonly used indirect approach for plastic componentsduplication.4.1 Type of RT ProcessesLow volume (from 10 to 100)• RTV Soft ToolingIntermediate volume (from 100 to 1000)• Metal filled Epoxy Tooling• Direct Metal Laser Sintering4.2 RTV Soft ToolingRTV silicone rubber mould is one of the important kinds of soft tooling which isan effective, high fidelity and inexpensive way to create multiple copies of amaster prototype part. Indeed, this technology has been used by the industry formany years. The only thing new is that the master pattern is produced by the RPtechnology. The other common kind of soft tooling material is tooling gradePolyurethane.This technology is not specially designed for a particular RP process. In fact,master patterns produced from most RP processes are suitable to apply for thistechnology.RTV molds can faithfully duplicate details and textures present on the masterpattern. Apart from detail, geometry can also be fully duplicated from the masterpart when prototypes are removed from the mould. Great care should be takento ensure that the pattern is in perfect condition. After RTV mould is completed,it can be used to further produce limited quantity of prototypes with a widevariety of material properties.Page 24IC Professional Training