Bi-Link, a worldwide engineering and manufacturing company based in Bloomingdale, has earned its standing among Fortune 100 companies in automotive, wireless, medical and consumer markets. Bi-Link, with wholly facilities in China, Mexico and U.S, has multiple capabilities worldwide from prototyping, stamping, molding and assembly, all in-house.
It’s not difficult to get a rise out of Frank Ziberna, R&D director for Bi-Link. Just tell him something can’t be done.
Challenges:
To produce rapid 3D-printed injection molds for test shot parts for fast iteration as well as testing of customer designs for injection molding.
Over the last few years, Ziberna and his colleagues at Bi-Link have heard all about the limitations of 3D printing for creating injection molds and production-quality sample parts: not fast enough, quality’s not up to snuff, can’t use production-level materials, molds can’t stand the heat or pressure. Like the biblical David, Bi-Link has smitten all comers.
Solutions:
Bi-Link currently uses three ProJet® MJP 3D printers from 3D Systems to produce injection mold tooling and sample parts. The ProJet® MJP printer is designed to produce functional plastic parts for professional-grade design and manufacturing applications. It uses 3D Systems’ specially engineered VisiJet® M3 materials, offering UV-curable plastic in a range of colors, translucencies and tensile strengths.
The combination of 3D Systems’ printers, advanced materials, and a proprietary post-processing tempering technique gives the finished molds greater strength than the original material, according to Bi-Link’s president, Ray Ziganto.
The beneficiaries of Bi-Link’s capabilities are electronics and medical manufacturing companies around the world—most of which can’t be named because of confidentiality agreements—for which Bi-Link delivers what was previously thought impossible.
Benefits:
“Customers love this service,” says Ziberna. “They would typically have to wait two to three weeks to get just tooling, never mind test parts. With the ProJet® printer we made one customer four different part designs over the course of six days, shipping them 10-12 parts for each iteration overnight.
“That’s a two- or three-month design and test cycle compressed to a week. For medical parts, we are creating the second and third revisions for a customer before competitors have even produced the first test part.”
No compromises
The sample parts created by Bi-Link use the same material as the customer’s production parts, whether it is liquid crystal polymer (LCP), polycarbonate, polystyrene, elastomer or other thermoplastic materials. Bi-Link has even developed 3D-printed molds for insert-molding applications.
“The customer doesn’t have to cut corners or make concessions in design,” says Ziberna. “We provide parts with the actual material they will use in production, so they don’t have to make design adjustments or modify parts.”
No corners are cut when it comes to performance, either. Bi-Link’s molds often are subjected to temperatures of more than 600 degrees Fahrenheit and withstand several tons of pressure with no degradation, according to Ziberna.
“You can put the 3D printed mold in the Morgan (a small plastic molding machine) and exert eight to 10 tons of pressure and it doesn’t mind,” he says.
Forms, fixtures, insert mold tooling, hybrid tools, thermoforming — Bi-Link can do just about anything up to 10 inches long. As many as 200 parts can be manufactured from a typical injection mold printed in the ProJet® MJP printer and finished with Bi-Link’s tempering process. A customer that provides Bi-Link with a CAD file in the morning can be making parts the next afternoon from the 3D-printed mold.
The sample parts and injection molds aren’t limited to simple patterns. Ziberna is happy to show the level of detail Bi-Link can achieve, rattling off features such as deep cores and recesses, tiny holes, clamp inserts in the mold, thin walls, small undercuts, and fine 1.5mm teeth.
“We make no concessions on tolerances,” he says. “We demand the same quality for parts as we get out of a steel mold. Any part you can manufacture, we can produce from a 3D-printed mold — exact material at a lower cost and one-fifth the lead time.”