Protolabs guarantees injection moulding dimensional tolerances

Protolabs is helping to make life easier for design engineers by guaranteeing specific dimensional tolerances for each type of plastic injection moulding resin.

The company is offering customers a machining tolerance of +/- 0.08 mm with a resin tolerance of between 0.002 mm/mm and 0.010 mm/mm depending on the material.

David Barnes, EMEA Product Manager for Injection Moulding, said: “For some applications, such as interference parts, dimensional tolerance is extremely important. Our aim has always been to make the design engineer’s job simpler by providing the right amount of verifiable information.”

“This means we can now guarantee the tolerances for all of our 50 stocked resins, and we can advise on the accuracy of the other 1500 that are available to our customers across the world.”

“For the stocked resins, the tolerance will be shown when customers upload their design and select their chosen material as part of our Protoquote system.”

“It means the information becomes part of the design for manufacturability analysis that is typically available within just a couple of hours.”

“Customer service is vital in our company as we pride ourselves on being the fastest digital manufacturing resource available. Speed is important in today’s market and part of that is getting the design and manufacture of the part right first time.”

“Our new resin tolerance system guarantee is just one example of our continuous improvement process to make sure that our customers are satisfied with our service and the information that we provide to help them do their job better.”

“In addition to this, recent investment in our metrology laboratory, with in-house coordinate measurement machinery and 3D laser scanning technology, enables us to measure and certify parts and prototypes more quickly.”