There are different ways of producing plastic prototypes and in this blog, we are going to discuss the top four or the most popular techniques of producing a plastic prototype. Plastic parts play a very important role in our lives and they are present almost everywhere. 

Prototyping as we know is very useful for the manufacturing sector with so many benefits, Quality of Plastic parts in Los Angeles is high class because of a very robust prototype manufacturing industry, It is the support of prototype manufacturers that makes Plastic parts in Los Angeles world class. It helps in saving time as well as money and although prototypes are also of different types usually they represent the final product roughly and give a fair idea about the functionality and design of the final product. Sometimes these prototypes are also used to represent your idea in front of an investor and get the investment that you need. A prototype helps designers as well as they can easily make changes in the design to achieve all desired functionality.

Before starting prototype manufacturing you must prepare a CAD model, which is nothing but a digital representation of your product. Once the CAD model is prepared then a prototype can be produced. Prototypes are also of two types they can either be visual or functional, visual simply gives you an idea about the final look whereas functional has mechanics of the final product as well. 

Different Process Of Making Plastic Prototypes: 

As discussed before there are various methods of plastic prototyping and one can choose any, here we are going to talk about the top four methods of producing a plastic prototype. Also as said above Plastic parts in Los Angeles are world-class because of the healthy prototype manufacturing industry. The prototype industry in LOS ANGELES also uses these four processes mostly.

Vacuum Casting

In this process, a silicon mould is used in which raw material is injected and before this silicon mould is prepared a master model is needed. In this process with the master, model parts are created for testing and fabricators can duplicate many prototype parts through this process. 3D printing or CNC machining is used to create a master model. Once the master model is created then Silicone based casting mould is prepared which is then used for prototype manufacturing. It is compatible with a wide range of materials.

3D Printing

It is also known as additive manufacturing as it involves more than one manufacturing technology. It is one of the innovative techniques and 3D printing is very much a blanket term. The three most popular methods of 3D prototype plastic part fabrication are as follows:

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM): Done through the layer-by-layer deposition of plastic materials with the help of extrusion.

Stereo lithography (SLA): Plastic resin materials are used for creating 3D prototype plastic parts. High powered laser is used for solidifying models. 

Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) : Just like SLA high powered laser is used for creating models. Here powdered material is sintered together to create a model. 

CNC Machine

A wide range of tools are used here and it is very much a fast-paced method for plastic prototype fabrication. 3D models are created from solid blocks of materials. A subtractive process is used which simply means removing material from solid blocks. It is different from 3D printing in which an additive process is used.

Injection Moulding 

It is a popular process for creating plastic prototypes when mass plastic prototype production is required but it should rather be used when limited production is desired. The technique is very simple and in this, a metal die is created and heated plastic resin is forcefully injected into the metal die and then it is cooled so that model solidifies. 

NOTE: As there are various methods for producing prototypes designers need to choose the process as per their need or which suits their application the most.