CARO-C TOOLING BOARD
CaroC is a Jackson Industries designed tooling board that allows for a cost effective and highly accurate product that reduces material waste and provides no porosity or risk of exotherm related fire or cracking.
Tooling boards still have high over head costs, which results in this process being out of reach in budgetary terms for all but the highest end application. This method still requires manual/skilled application of film type release agents in all but the most simple applications. Porosity is also still an issue in the sector, which requires engineering & lamination to get to stock-block sizes required for CNC machining.
Stock “Aware” machining operations are still a real day to day struggle and machine risk with manually fabricated stock. Jackson Industries, being an early adopter and innovator made a large investment in machinery for the putty over polystyrene substrate technique, quickly found the inherent limits and frustrations of the method, and actively pursued something better.
To overcome these limitations, Jackson Industries has designed their own tooling board in-house. Having a daily involvement in the utilisation and advancement of Polyester resins within our internal Electrical cabinet manufacturing plant, Jackson Industries developed a low cost tool stock product for use with low temp cure processes such as RTM Lite (LRTM), Low-profile tooling systems such as generating foundry patterns, fiberglass production moulds for high volume production, and low temperature cure pre-preg systems.
The product has been developed as a low-exotherm two part system that can be cast into either crude form-work or machined urethane foam, this product can be molded into any dimensions with zero porosity which navigates around the hugely wasteful laminated tooling board “solution”. The biggest single stock casting the company has done to date is 600kg, which was machined the next day into a GRP production tool, with no risk of exotherm related fire or cracking and no porosity. It was soon ready for a quick wipe of “Free-kote(tm)” and to go straight into production.
To put this into perspective in terms of costs for manufacturing, CaroC easily halves material costs, utilizes 1/4 of the labor required to prepare stock for machining, and completely removes risks brought on by spray-film release agents. In the majority of applications CaroC completely removes hand-fairing of master tools, even on the most “flimsy” machining centers, only the lightest polishing of subsequent profile tooling systems is required.
For Jackson internal LRTM production, Jackson Industries no longer make “plugs”. Instead Jackson Industries rely completely on 3D CAD models of split tooling, with the halves not coming together all the way until production. Internally, this is a 5 day turnaround in a profile system, CaroC can also be used directly as the LRTM tool in short-run circumstances. CaroC is limited to around 45 degrees Celsius soaked.
Call our design team or click on the ‘Request More Info’ button’ to discuss further how CaroC can improve your project. As a primary producer, we have large scope to change formulation to suit your application.