ZW3D today announced it has been chosen by BioPlastics, a manufacturer of coated webbing products, for efficient mold design, helping them respond to customers faster than ever with saved costs. BioPlastics is a leading global manufacturer of coated webbing and assemblies, with products widely applied in markets like equine, medical, sporting goods, canine, safety and military and more.
The Need
In the past, BioPlastics used a 2D system to design customized extrusion dies to apply plastic coating to webbing and then outsourced the machining work. And their vendor would re-create the design using CAD/CAM program. “It was inefficient and cost us money,” says Bob Sherwin, Design Engineer of BioPlastics. “There would always be these extra expenses for ‘engineering time’ on invoices from the tooling shop.”
Sherwin says, “Since the tooling shop was using a 3D package, we started investigating 3D solid modeling programs and finally selected ZW3D, in part, because our vendor was using ZW3D, but more importantly, it appeared to have an easy learning curve and provided all capabilities needed.”
The Solution
Now, using ZW3D, BioPlastics creates 3D models of the extrusion dies and sends them directly to the vendor, which speeds the die creating process and saves costs spent on die recreation. Finally, the shortened leads time allows BioPlastics to be more responsive to customers.
“I was surprised that ZW3D was so easy to use,” Sherwin notes. “It takes just seconds to change a dimension and update the whole design, including drawings.”
Craig Tennant, VP of manufacturing for BioPlastics, adds, “There has been an unanticipated benefit of using ZW3D. We now use ZW3D to produce 3D photo-realistic renderings that allow customers to see exactly the finished product before producing a prototype. This gives them a better understanding of what they’re going to get, speeds up their approval process and increases their satisfaction.
