At Prototype Casting, rapid prototyping is at the core of what we do. Building prototypes serves a variety of purposes, including creating models to serve as a small scale for engineers and designers to plan out large-scale operations. Prototype creation hosts certain benefits, including production evaluation and evolution prior to manufacturing investments, which allows for an easy evaluation for customers pre-launch. Also, creating small-scale prototypes will streamline the design of the product in order to reduce costs for the product in the future.
As useful as rapid investment and rapid prototype casting has proven to be, it unfortunately comes with a number of misunderstandings from people. At Prototype Casting, we find that although this key activity involved in product development proves beneficial for companies, many organizations do not utilize the prototyping process to its full potential. Why is that? Well, as we just mentioned, the misconceptions regarding rapid prototyping are likely at least partially to blame.
While rapid prototyping and investment casting processes are not always a perfect science, people should realize that’s the nature of the industry. After all the whole purpose of the metal casting process is to test and experiment with things that are unknown, or even experiment with ideas that are just plain wrong. Yet, the process can also test ideas that prove worthy of further evaluation. Let’s look at a few common misconceptions of rapid prototyping and rapid investment casting.