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Bicycle Lampshade Prototype
Bicycle Lampshade Prototype
Project Overview:
Material：Acrylic (PMMA) .
Manufacturing method: Silicone mold vacuum casting
Surface Finishing: polish
Quantity: 7 pieces.
Lead Time: 5 Days
Summary:
This is a project of bicycle rear lampshade prototype. Customers from Japan found DDPROTOTYPE by searching “prototype machining” in Google. Our professional website has attracted customers’ attention.. After the price comparison, DDPROTOTYPE is 40% lower than that of Japan’s local rapid prototyping company. Therefore, the customer arranges DDPROTOTYPE to manufacture the lampshade prototype.
After receiving the prototype, the customer was very satisfied and established a long-term strategic partnership with DDPROTOTYPE.
Select machining method
The part size is about 59 × 33 × 10 mm. According to the customer’s requirements, this part needs to be transparent, and the order quantity is 7 pieces. There is no doubt that this is a typical case of rapid prototyping. In general, we first think of CNC machining. However, CNC machining sometimes has limitations. For example, there are many “hexagonal ridges” inside the lampshade, so it is impossible to use CNC to achieve sharp corners. That is to say, it will be a huge project to use CNC machining to polish some details into transparent bodies.
Prototyping Solution
After many rounds of deliberation, the mechanic of DDPROTOTYPE finally adopted Silicone mold vacuum casting. Vacuum casting can not only complete “hexagonal ridge”, but also finish polishing better in finishing service, so that the lampshade is completely transparent. Therefore, vacuum casting is the best solution for this project.
Prototyping With Vacuum Casting
First of all, made a prototyping by precise 3D printing, it is much more cost-effective than CNC machining, and the ridge detail was created correctly without any polishing.
Then we used this prototype to build silicone mold, and produced the parts by vacuum casting (Please check https://www..com/vacuum-casting to get more information about vacuum casting service).
Prototype Polishing
After a series of machining, the prototype does not very transparent. It doesn’t matter. Our technologist sprayed some “gloss oil” on the prototype surface to make the lampshade prototype as transparent and bright as possible. DDPROTOTYPE only took 5 days to produce 7 lampshade prototypes. Customers are very satisfied with our prototype machining service.
Advantage of Vacuum Casting
In summary, there are many advantages of using vacuum casting to do this job, such as:
1) Create the ridge pattern precisely and fast.
2) Save much time that polish the part to be very smooth.
3) The cost is much lower than CNC machining.