Prototyping
Special wishes of the customer, such as prototyping and modern design, make the utilisation of the FormBalancer interesting specifically for medium-size companies. Tryouts manufactured with conventional press technology have so far been very cost-intensive.
The FormBalancer now enables several prototypes to be manufactured within a very short time at an excellent price-performance ratio. This facilitates modifications intended to increase the efficiency of components in research & development or in the factory. Modern and innovative product design is placing increasingly greater demands on the components and is playing an increasingly larger part in the production process.
The FormBalancer meets the demand in this sector, because it allows you to manufacture free-form faces with the desired surface quality and form-holding characteristics in a fast, uncomplicated and cost-effective manner.
The most important performance features of hydroforming using the FormBalancer for development and prototyping of components:
- Great potential for cutting costs, since the tooling costs of the Formbalancer are less than 20% of the conventional tooling costs.
- This enables component variations to be produced at a low price and allows you to optimize the component function.
- Development times are reduced as only the moulding box (i.e. the negative moulding tool) needs to be manufactured.
- The prototype tool can later be used as a tool for batch production.
- Complex shapes with free-form faces can be produced in an uncomplicated manner. No work is required to adapt positive and negative moulding tools, as is the case with the conventional deep-drawing process.
- Simple optimisation of materials: very different materials can be inserted into the same tool.
- Aluminium, steel sheets, stainless steel, special steel alloys, titan, etc.
- Optimisation of material thicknesses between 0.05 and 6 mm