How ARaymond Validates Injection-Molded Parts with 3D Printed Mold Inserts

For manufacturers developing injection-molded parts, validating a design in the final production material can be difficult before investing in costly production tooling.

IPC, France’s technical center for plastics and composites, helped ARaymond explore a faster, more flexible and less expensive approach: 3D print polymer mold inserts for faster design iteration and functional validation at lower cost.

The Challege

French company ARaymond is a global leader in automotive fasteners, assembly solutions, and quick connectors, offering high added value services from new product development to multidisciplinary product management with a sharp focus on customer needs.

The company needed to create functional prototypes of a cable clip before moving forward with tooling for high-volume production. The prototypes needed to go beyond validating shape and fit. They had to be injection molded in the final production material, to evaluate the molded parts and validate the design before committing to costly metal tooling.

Traditional machined tooling can take weeks to produce and modify, making multiple design iterations both time-consuming and expensive.

The Solution

ARaymond collaborated with IPC, a French innovation center with experts in plastics and polymer processes, to develop polymer mold inserts using the Stratasys Origin Two 3D printing workflow with Ultracur3D RG 3280 material.

Once the design file was ready, the mold insert was printed in approximately two hours, followed by cleaning, UV post-curing and limited machining before being installed in the injection molding press. 

This approach made it possible to produce and evaluate different mold designs quickly. For particularly challenging features, where conventional ejection could damage thin sections of the polymer tooling, the team also explored soluble resin inserts to enable successful demolding. 

The Impact

By replacing conventional prototype tooling with 3D-printed polymer inserts, IPC and ARaymond could:

• Produce functional prototypes in the final injection-molding material
• Test multiple designs within a week
• Reduce iteration time from weeks to hours
• Validate parts before investing in costly production tooling
• Use in-house additive manufacturing and molding capabilities to reduce reliance on subcontracting

The project demonstrates how additive manufacturing can bridge the gap between design development and mass production, giving manufacturers a faster way to validate injection-molded parts, materials and designs before committing to production tooling.