Plastic Prototyping

Our plastic prototyping services use the latest technology to deliver high quality cost-effective acrylic / plastic prototypes. Our plastoc prototypes can withstand rigorous testing – giving you confidence in the final design before investing in tooling and manufacturing.

Our plastoc prototyping service combines design and manufacturing expertise with advanced manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing and more traditional manufacturing techniques like CNC machining and thermoforming processes to provide you with the perfect solution for your plastic prototypes and low volume needs.

What Is Plastic Prototyping?

Plastic prototyping involves using specialised techniques for making high-quality physical models of a design idea. Prototypes are useful for design improvement, as stepping stones to full production or for engineering testing. They are meant to be made quickly and economically, without the need for the investment in hard tooling.

Low Volume Plastic Manufacturing

When compared with injection moulding, vacuum forming and thermoforming is a more financially viable alternative for larger, lower volume parts. In addition to significantly reduced prototyping and production tooling costs, thermoforming provides a much faster product development time.

Our 50 years expertise in thermoforming processes will ensure we can manufacture even low volume parts cost-effectively. Our investment in cutting-edge technology guarantees we can rapidly manufacture high quality products with minimum wastage and energy use.

Our design team will advise on the most effective solutions and we can also offer a complete ‘design to delivery’ service which handles everything including warehousing and distribution if required.

Benefits of Plastic Prototyping

Advanced materials can closely match the look, feel, and material characteristics of parts produced with traditional manufacturing processes such as injection moulding. Materials can simulate parts with fine details and textures, smooth and low-friction surfaces, rigid and robust housings, or soft-touch and clear components. Manufactured parts can then be finished with secondary processes like machining, polishing and printing to replicate any visual attribute of a final part, as well as machined to create assemblies from multiple parts and materials.

Plastic components for industrial and automotive sectors require extensive functional testing to see how a part or assembly will function when subjected to stresses and conditions of in-field use. High-performance prototypes can withstand thermal, chemical, and mechanical stress. The technology also provides an efficient solution for creating custom test fixtures to simplify functional testing and certification by gathering consistent data.