The Soft Tooling insert was manufactured in a high temperature photopolymer by Digital Light Processing (vat photopolymerization).
The paper culminates in a discussion regarding the values, strengths and weaknesses of hard and soft tools and points to potential future directions of research.
That includes dozens of new products he designed specifically for the shop, including a heart-shaped box of inedible wooden candy ($125), pictured, and crocheted soft tools like a saw, hammer and paintbrush ($225 to $250 each).
The VACNT arrays were shown to have high surface quality with no observable residue left behind, demonstrating focused laser micromachining as a readily available soft tooling means for direct manufacturing of VACNT devices.
The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to investigate the capability of a soft tooling process chain employing Additive Manufacturing (AM) for preproduction of an insert with micro features by injection molding.
Such production lines could be extremely efficient, provided they turned out large volumes of the same product say, a minimum of 200,000 car bodies a year or 600,000 a year of something as complicated as an engine.Fortunately, the trend today is to use "soft tooling" based on computerised production systems that allow far greater flexibility.
The jury is out on the best method to clean those types of soft tools.
If "soft tooling" was de rigueur at Tesla, no wonder halfway modern production techniques must seem like a miracle.
Today, 20 years later, you can design a product with the freeware version of SketchUp, make your first rapid prototype on your own desktop MakerBot, raise $100,000 in crowd-funding on Kickstarter, purchase $5,000 soft tools from PCH, set up virtual distribution with Shipwire or Amazon or both, and market and sell directly to your customers off your own website.
