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Tell us about your project
  • +86 755 8285 8796

At Agilian, we are dedicated to supporting companies in developing their new products as fast as technology allows.

That’s why we’re the first company in China to invest in innovative Fast Tooling Iteration (3D-printed soluble tooling) hardware*. This hardware provides fast, flexible mold tooling to produce production-intent parts during the prototyping phase, allowing for much faster testing and validation of new parts and mold designs.

*Before now, this type of technology was only used in Europe and North America, mostly by some large companies, and it is not well-known at all in China.

What is Fast Tooling Iteration?

In FTI, a 3D printer creates a mold from a specialized soluble resin. These molds can be designed with intricate geometries that might be very challenging or even impossible to achieve with traditional mold-making methods (using hard metals). Due to the mold material being soluble, it can be dissolved in a special bath after the part is formed, allowing for easy extraction of the final product without damaging complex or delicate features.

We operate the latest version of Nexa3D’s LCD 3D printers, which is the fastest on the market!

Contact us if you want to know how soon we can deliver your first injection-molded prototype, or how little you need to invest to get started.
Keep reading to learn more about our unique offerings in the field of low-volume injection molding.

The Fast Tooling Iteration Process

As you may know, designing and fabricating hard steel tooling can take weeks or even longer. FIT creates tooling that can provide production-intent prototype parts for validation and verification in just a day or two.

How are these soluble molds different?

The lifespan of these 3D-printed soluble molds is short because our objective is to get to the first parts rapidly. This means that we sacrifice the mold tooling if needed and do not aim for high volumes. We typically only get one or two shots out of a mold, but benefit by not needing to compromise on design freedom or material choice which is perfect when working with new product designs.

Traditional injection molds, which are usually made from steel, are typically designed to withstand hundreds of thousands of injection cycles. However, the fabrication process of these hard metal molds often takes six weeks or more (including trials & revisions) and is vastly more expensive.
Additionally, you lose design freedom once the hard steel tooling is cut, because changes are both time-consuming and expensive meaning that you need to be 100% certain that the design is right beforehand. This is quite constraining when developing a new product.

Which materials can be used in Fast Tooling Iteration?

Unlike traditional injection molding, FTI allows the use of different materials including common thermoplastics, silicone, metal, and even ceramics. This means that injection-molded prototype parts are within reach using this process for a wide range of industries.

Importantly, Fast Tooling Iteration allows us to use production-intent materials in your prototypes, meaning that we can validate and test parts and products that are already close to your final production version.

Here you can see the same part made from common injection mold polymers PEEK (above) and recycled PP using 3D printed soluble molds created via FTI:

Why use FTI for plastic parts?

We use this technology to assist customers who are developing custom-designed plastic parts that will need to be molded.

FTI speeds up the plan-design-prototype-test cycle and to allows us to turn around better prototypes fast. You can get production-grade (representative) parts that use the same materials as in mass production in as little as 8-10 days, enabling an early validation of and validate their design. If time is of the essence, it can make sense to get several versions of the same part made this way at once – which would be prohibitively expensive to do with conventional metal tooling.

FTI provides a bridge between 3D printing and ‘traditional’ plastic injection molding, with the benefits of both:

  • 3D printing can quickly and cheaply produce parts with complex and intricate geometries, but not in production-intent materials. FTI provides the same level of design freedom as 3D-printing, but without the restrictions on choice of materials
  • Traditional hard steel molds are supremely versatile, but take a long time to fabricate, are expensive, and each revision takes time & money. FTI provides the same level of versatility, but without the lead times and initial investments, since soluble tooling can be dissolved, allowing you to de-mold parts that have undercuts and would usually require complex side actions inside the mold.
But certain shapes cannot be de-molded without side actions inside the mold, right?

Fast Tooling Iteration (FTI) is an innovative process that bridges the gap between 3D printing and traditional injection molding typically using hard steel mold tooling, providing a highly flexible solution for prototyping and, in certain cases, small-scale production runs – for the entire range of geometries you may want to mold, and in the entire range of moldable materials.

fast tooling iteration sample part
(An example of the complex injection molded parts that can be achieved rapidly via FTI)

FTI is just one part of our in-house injection molding capability

We focus on highly-engineered tooling here, and freeform injection molding is just one part of the puzzle often used in the prototyping stages for new products. Our injection molding team provides:
  • Mold tooling design
  • Tooling machining shop
  • Injection molding facility
Because, at the end of the day, you are not looking for prototypes. You are looking for the fastest, cheapest way to get your product to market, and we can help you from the first step of the design process all the way to the fully scaled-up serial production.
Our group includes a dedicated mold tooling design and fabrication and injection molding facility with multiple mold presses. A few photos from our tooling fabrication shop:
Here are several of our injection mold presses in use to produce parts for our customers:
Tell us about your project

Fill out this simple form to contact us directly about creating 3D-printed soluble molds with FTI, and do take advantage of the ‘upload part’ function* as this will allow us to see the part you’re planning to make. That helps us understand your needs and get started sooner.

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