A Catalyst Story

CATALYST PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GROUP, INC.

Research | Design | Engineer | Prototype | Manufacture

Thanks for chatting with us at STEAM Night and taking the time to find out more about product development at Catalyst. If you were asked how your day went when you got home, you may have said something like:

“I went to a baseball game and all I got was this bookmark from some company called Catalyst!”

Ok, that’s true, but hear me out for a minute.  We could have just handed out some pens, brochures or maybe even some koozies with our logo ordered from a promotional website and called it a day.  But we make things here at Catalyst and we think better of you.  While we hope you get some good use out of your simple new bookmark, it’s actually meant as a placeholder to signify any complex component or product that our company could make from scratch.

Catalyst Product Development Group, Inc. is a premiere design firm that also offers engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing services all within the same building.  If you didn’t know we are based right here in Indy, we aren’t surprised.  Since most of our clients enjoy an iron-clad NDA, it’s possible that we’ve been Indy’s best-kept secret for the last 25 years!

A few weeks ago, we decided to make something to give our visitors at the Indians game. So, we kicked off a brainstorming session that pared the wide-ranging ideas down to four options:

Can you guess which option we went with?  That’s right!  We made the bottle opener!

Wait, what?  Yup, we made a Catalyst logo bottle opener. It works well, but we didn’t give you one and here’s why.  Marketing (that’s me) was adamant that the logo shouldn’t stray from the style guide. So, I requested that we 3D print a few as well as injection mold a version with a metal insert for added strength. We quickly whipped up a batch and passed them around the office, but it was apparent that my design constraints for our logo added bulk.  In order for our unaltered logo to have the right fulcrum point and leverage to do the assigned job, it was admittedly too wide to be convenient. (My bad!) And while our designers could have just created a slimmer version with an embossed logo, the bottle opener never passed the prototyping phase.  We decided to change directions altogether.

And at Catalyst, that’s okay.  Whether it’s due to user feedback or client preference, we pivot on projects all the time!  The Catalyst process stays flexible in order to quickly switch gears as projects evolve.

After my misguided requests on the bottle opener, I thought it best to take a back seat on developing the bookmark.  It was August 11th and we were starting from scratch. I was pretty impressed by what happened next.

Paul Zink, our Creative Services Director, suggested we change the colorant from the material we had in stock to our actual Pantone color in order to perfectly match our brand.  It was sitting in our receiving department three days later.

The engineering department had already drafted the bookmark in CAD and printed a few options in our prototype lab to get a consensus on size and proportion.  Two processes were used to make these out of varying materials.

At the same time, Brandon and Levi, our newest additions to the engineering department, decided to 3D print an SLA mold to be used in parallel to our traditional mold as a demonstration of the technique.

Tooling the QC10 aluminum mold began by fabricating the two halves of the insert with our Wire EDM. Then we used a combination of CNC and Sinker EDM processing to achieve the sharp angles in our logo and lettering.

We verified the placement of the ejector pins and finally finished the surface with a quick trip to our sand-blasting station.  It only took our tooling department three days to go from a fresh block of aluminum to a finished mold ready for the injection press!

How did Brandon and Levi do with our 3D printed mold?  When compared to aluminum, an SLA mold is a different beast altogether and several factors are in play here.  Where you place the gate may be different, material flows and releases differently, plus cooling and venting is of special importance.

The process took four hours to design, five hours to print, two hours to cure, then another hour to post-process and clean. In the end, they made four mold variations in two days.  Multiple printed molds were ready a full day faster than the aluminum mold- not bad!

Could 3D printed molds hold their own against aluminum?  The short answer is “Yes, under the right circumstances.”, according to Brandon and Levi.

We installed the 3D printed molds in a 13” x 19” base for our 50-ton JSW injection molding press using polypropylene and our newly delivered colorant.  It took a bit of experimentation to dial in the tonnage, shot size, temp and cycle time before we were happy with the parts from these molds.  Once we hit the sweet spot, a few dozen parts looked great.

But the molds eventually began to degrade, and we were losing fine detail in the lettering.  The short lifespan of these printed molds had been expected, that’s why multiple molds were at the ready.  When compared to 3D printing with FDM and SLA, there is the distinct advantage of getting real parts in your preferred resin and color. The bottom line is that SLA molds can be a viable option for specific projects with tight deadlines and low volume requirements.

After we had our fun with the printed molds, the aluminum mold was swapped into the same press. Terry, our molding department manager, produced a run of 250 bookmarks in no time. The cycle time on the aluminum mold was faster due to higher pressure, quicker cooling, and the added benefit of ejection pins. This batch is what we sent home with the visitors to our booth. They feature a refined surface texture that is lacking on all the other iterations.  Should demand for our humble bookmark skyrocket, we could run several hundred-thousand parts out of that mold without issue.

On August 11th, we started over.  Fast forward to August 20th, and I had bookmarks to share with you.

The Catalyst Difference

Now in the end, this isn’t really a story about the bookmark at all, it’s about the unique Catalyst approach to making something that is brand new.  When you are a client of ours you gain an expert partner in plastic development that isn’t afraid to push the envelope when it comes to technique or timeline.  You may want to “bookmark” our Process and Plastic Parts pages as a handy reference on our wide-ranging capabilities.

Simply Get In Touch for more technical information and see how Catalyst can take a basic product concept From Mind To Market.