SDI Plastics specialise in the early stages of bringing your concepts to life, through prototyping. Following on from the product design and innovation phase, the second part of your journey moves seamlessly into producing a physical model or prototype of your product. There are a large variety of prototypes available and created as part of the manufacturing process. These range from simple cost effective prototyping plastic prototyping, rapid prototyping and metal prototyping.

The most important aspect about prototyping is to test your new design concept and to validate your design at the beginning of the manufacturing process. At this stage, you can test an idea, theory and functionality of the product, as well as identify any challenges with the design aesthetics. Prototypes such as 3D printed prototypes and 3D rapid prototyping are a great tool used for design improvement, and are the stepping stones before full production and engineering testing commence. 

Types of 3D Prototyping

SDI Plastics provide a large variety of prototyping methods, either taking your CAD design or manual design and producing a 3D printed prototype or a 3D rapid prototype. Working closely with our industrial designers and engineers, there are a number of factors considered when determining the type of prototyping method used.  Consideration is given to the type of product, material, complexity, functionality and design of the product. Our team at SDI Plastics will recommend the best method for prototyping your product. 

SDI Plastics can provide 3D prototypes in under a week, and for more complex highly aesthetic prototypes in two weeks. With prototyping, you can take your design concept to test, iterate and refine your design to produce your new product very early on in the manufacturing process.  Prototyping speeds up your route to market and allows you to quickly test and refine your component by proving your design prior to production. The process is quick and economical, without the need for any large investment.

Metal prototyping

SDI Plastics use a 3D printing process called Direct Metal Laser Melting (DMLM). This additive manufacturing process uses a high powered laser to melt and fuse successive layers of powdered metal into three dimensional solid parts. The advantage is that the more complex or feature-rich the component, the more economical the process becomes. Metal 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that produces impossible to make parts directly from your CAD data. Advantages to this process include the ability to produce strong, complex geometries, internal lattice structures, conformal cooling channels and other features that cannot be made with traditional machining. Parts can be made quickly with a minimum of material waste making them ideal for the next generation engineering in aerospace, medical, defence, automotive and other industries. 

The advantages of creating a metal prototype are that it allows the team to build further efficiencies into the manufacturing process of the product.  Efficiencies such as refining the tool and improving cycle times allow you to double the production and manufacture a larger quantity of products, ultimately delivering on quality as well as delivering commercial value for the product.

Let’s work together and bring your new idea to reality!