As your product’s design evolves from concept to prototype, GVL’s FDM plays an important role in testing. FDM prototypes use industrial-grade thermoplastics, allowing you to test in real-world environments and make decisions that have a dramatic effect on the cost to manufacture your product.
GVL 3D prototypes produced from any of the various production-grade thermoplastics on our 3D prototyping system are virtually identical to the final product. They have the same geometry, accuracy and production-grade thermoplastics. Using our system to build functional prototypes allows you to find problems and prove out design early before the costs of change, development and production rise. This approach of testing form, fit and especially function puts you much closer to a higher-quality end product.
Why manufacture prototypes with 3D Production Systems?
Low-Volume or Custom Plastic Manufacturing & Tooling
GVL’s experienced Product Development Team can assist you with production tooling or machining. For low-volume part production or manufacturing tools—such as jigs, fixtures and tooling masters—the benefits are too great to ignore.
Reduce Time
GVL Proto Poly can produce models in hours, shaving weeks – sometimes months – off plastic part production.
- Accelerates product development by bringing ideas to life faster and less expensively
- Enables you to correct errors early in the design process and before the tooling stage
- Reduces time-to-market
Reduce Cost
Save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating machining or tooling costs for manufacturing tools or low-volume production parts. Just-in-time inventory frees your warehouse and allows you to make design changes inexpensively.
- Better-predict end product performance and gain certification confidence with high-tolerance parts
- Find problems early in design cycle before the cost to correct them rises
- Eliminate one or more rounds of tooling by proving out the product’s design before it reaches tooling
Optimize Design
Now we can create custom plastic parts that match your original design. Fused Deposition Modeling additive manufacturing technology removes design constraints for manufacturing tools because it builds parts layer-by-layer, from the bottom up.
Other Benefits
- Multiple iterations of design produce better end product
- Gain early approvals for required testing such as UL and CE certification
- Easy-to-use system with no messy liquid vats or powder containers to maintain
- This state-of-the-art technology process is simple, safe and produces thermoplastic parts in hours, not weeks
