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Early product
development is one of the major benefits you will receive from working
with Lawton Pattern. Not only are we able to decrease casting development
time, sometimes by more than 50%, we are also able to afford engineers
the freedom to make extensive design changes during this process
without jeopardizing product costs.
We are able
to provide this value mainly because of our ability to produce foam
shapes and our adoption of simultaneous manufacturing.
Simultaneous
manufacturing is the process by which we develop, prototype, and
manufacture simultaneously. This is in contrast to the traditional
approach in which a step by step sequential process is followed.
From the creation
of a preliminary model, Lawton is able to create exact foam replicas
for your desired shape. The foam replica is an inexpensive, exact
representation of the actual casting that affords the opportunity
to easily make design changes. The ability to easily make design
changes offers us the opportunity to begin preparing the casting
process simultaneous to the process of finalizing the model. If
changes to the model are desired during this time, we expeditiously
and inexpensively make the changes to the foam replica. The worst
case scenario is that we have to destroy the inexpensive foam replica
and start over. Upon approval of the final model, we many times
have the initial casting already completed.
Once the casting
design is approved, manufacturing of the production pattern/tooling
begins. This is the process of creating the pattern using the customer's
material of choice to replace the foam replica. Simultaneous to
this process, casting production can continue through the utilization
of the foam replica. New foam replicas can be expeditiously and
inexpensively manufactured as necessitated by design changes or
integrity issues.
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