When it comes to making products, every detail counts. The way a mold or tool is made shapes the quality, cost, and speed of production. That’s why businesses pay close attention to the tooling process.
Choosing between soft tooling and hard tooling can feel overwhelming, especially when terms like injection molding, CNC machining, and urethane casting get thrown into the mix.
Soft tooling is often linked with speed and lower upfront costs, while hard tooling is tied to durability and high-volume production.
But the choice isn’t always simple. Each tooling option has its own strengths, limits, and best use cases. The decision often comes down to understanding the differences between soft tooling and hard tooling and how they impact production.
In this guide, we will explore what each one is, look at their advantages and disadvantages, and highlight the key differences to help you make the best choice for your needs.
What is Soft Tooling?
Soft tooling is a method of building molds (also referred to as tools) from soft, less durable materials. Think of materials like silicone, urethane, or even softer metals like aluminum.
Soft tooling materials can be formed more easily and quickly than metals. Soft tooling is not intended to last forever; it is designed to facilitate the quick and affordable completion of a job for a finite number of parts.
This process is ideal for prototyping and low-volume productions. For instance, a company may utilize urethane molding with silicone molds to create the first 50 prototype units of a new product casing.
The first 50 can be tested to get a feel for the design, gather feedback, and make changes without incurring the expense of conventional hard tooling and molding. Soft tooling is quite common in molding processes, especially in urethane manufacturing.
Soft tooling can also be used to create tools for other formable materials, such as carbon fiber composites. This is the way to go when you want something made now and don’t need to produce in the millions of units.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Soft Tooling
Like any manufacturing method, soft tooling has its own advantages and disadvantages. The very things that make it a great option for some projects make it a poor option for others. Let us analyze the pros and cons of soft tooling methodology in more depth.
Advantages of Soft Tooling
The advantages of soft tooling are largely in the areas of speed, cost, and flexibility. For product development and small-batch manufacturing, these advantages make it an incredibly useful tool.
Reduced initial cost
The primary allure of soft tooling is its reduced cost, primarily due to the materials used to fabricate it versus those used for hardened steel. The materials used for soft tooling, such as aluminum, silicone, or titanium, are significantly less expensive than those used for hardened steel.
Additionally, the soft tooling mold process is significantly less labor-intensive and does not require heavy-duty machining, resulting in lower initial costs. In fact, soft tooling can be a viable tooling option for startups or low-budget projects.
Quicker production lead time
In today’s fast-paced world, speed means everything. Soft tooling excels in this area. A soft tool can ordinarily be designed and fabricated in a matter of days, while a hard tool will most likely take weeks or months to manufacture!
This expediency is crucial for quickly producing an initial prototype. Consistently delivering physical parts to designers and engineers increases the speed of an efficient product development cycle and reduces the time to market.
Easy to modify or change
What happens if you produce your first batch of parts and discover a design flaw? If you are using soft tooling, it is relatively simple and inexpensive to make any adjustments.
Because you are working with soft tooling, the mold can easily be modified or, in many cases, a new tool can be produced at a moderate price, which is an excellent benefit to the iterative design phase of any project.
Good for low-volume production
Soft tooling will undoubtedly be your best option for low-volume production. Soft tooling is the most efficient method for manufacturing quantities ranging from a small handful of parts to hundreds.
Soft tooling is highly beneficial, whether you are conducting market testing, fulfilling custom orders, or simply using it as a bridge tool (the soft tool you may use to manufacture parts while waiting for the hard tool). Soft tooling will be the option. It is the option between prototyping and full-scale production.
Disadvantages of Soft Tooling
Now, let’s examine the cons. The advantages of soft tooling come with some significant trade-offs that should be considered. These drawbacks aren’t trivial, as they can have substantial effects on the outcome of your project.
Shorter mold life
The biggest drawback of soft tooling is its reduced longevity. Because the molds are made of softer materials, they wear out much faster. A silicone mold may last for a mere 25-50 cycles before it degrades to the point of losing its molded shape. You cannot use the same tool for long, so it is always impractical for mass production.
Limited material compatibility
Soft tooling molds do not have the same ability as hard tools to handle extreme conditions. They are not suitable for materials that require high speeds, injection pressures, or temperatures, so the selection of materials for the parts you create is limited. High-performance plastics or other rigid materials typically need the toughness of hard tooling.
Reduced accuracy and durability
Soft tooling is great for a prototype part, but it is typically less accurate than hard tooling. Due to the soft mold material, the molds can flex or deform slightly during the molding process, resulting in parts with marginally tighter tolerances. The surface finish quality of the finished parts may not be as high as with hard tooling.
What is Hard Tooling?
As the name implies, hard tooling is tooling and molds made from very solid, durable materials (hard carving steel, steel alloys, nickel alloys, etc.). These types of molds can withstand the extreme injection pressures and high temperatures encountered during high-volume production processes, such as plastic injection molding.
The process of tooling hard tools and molds is generally more complicated with greater precision. Often, advanced methods such as Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining are required to cut the mold cavity out of a metal block.
The tooling is sometimes heat-treated for hardness and wear resistance. This is an extremely robust tooling that can withstand numerous production cycles, often producing hundreds of thousands or millions of parts.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Hard Tooling
Hard tooling has been and continues to be the workhorse of manufacturing. While offering unmatched durability and precision, it comes with a cost that makes determining its advantages and disadvantages a thoughtful consideration.
High durability
Moulds for hard tooling are made to last. They are made of strong metals that can handle the stresses of continuous, high-speed production. They won’t wear out quickly because they are very resistant to wear, which means they will last a long time and be useful.
Consistent accuracy
Hard tools don’t bend or warp when pressure is applied because they are made of stiff materials. This enables them to produce plastic parts with very accurate and consistent tolerances, even with very tight tolerances. Hard tooling is necessary for products that require extreme precision, such as those used in the medical or aerospace industries.
Good for high-volume production
This is the main reason why hard tooling is used. It was designed to produce a large quantity of items simultaneously. You can produce millions of parts with a single hard tool. You can also make moulds with more than one cavity, which allows them to produce multiple parts simultaneously. This significantly accelerates the production process.
Long lifespan
A well-made hard tool lasts a very long time. This investment incurs higher upfront costs, but it pays off over time. When you divide that first cost by a million parts, the cost per part becomes very low, making it the best choice for producing a large number of parts.
Disadvantages of Hard Tooling
Hard tooling is strong, but it’s not always the best option. One of the biggest problems with it is that it is expensive and not very flexible.
High initial cost
Hard tooling costs a significant amount of money, and there’s no way to avoid it. The high upfront costs are due to the expensive materials and the complicated, time-consuming CNC machining process. For new products or companies with limited budgets, this initial investment can be a significant challenge.
Longer time for production
Making a hard tool takes time. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to design, machine, polish, and test a hard tool. Due to this long lead time, you will have to wait longer to start full-scale production, which can delay the launch of a product.
Limited flexibility for design changes
It is very difficult and expensive to modify a hardened steel tool once it has been made. You may need to perform extensive re-machining or discard the tool and start over if you make even a minor change to the design. Hard tooling isn’t a good choice for products that are still in the early stages of design because it can’t be changed.
Key Differences of Soft tooling vs Hard tooling
To make the right choice, you need to know the differences between soft tooling and hard tooling. Let’s examine the comparison in four key areas.
Tooling Materials
The choice of materials is the most obvious big difference. Soft tooling utilizes softer materials, including silicone, urethane, and aluminum.
Hard tooling utilizes metals and materials that are harder and more durable, such as P20 tool steel, H13 steel, and other steel alloys. The choice of material has a direct effect on everything else, including cost and durability.
Tooling Applications
Soft and hard tooling have very different uses. Prototyping, design verification, and low-volume production are all great uses for soft tooling. It’s used to make first prototypes in processes like urethane casting.
Hard tooling is designed for producing a large quantity of items quickly and efficiently. It is the standard for making medical devices, car parts, and consumer goods by injection moulding. The argument between soft tooling and hard tooling typically revolves around the number of parts that need to be produced.
Tooling Price
Cost is a significant factor in the decision between soft and hard tooling. Soft tooling is inexpensive to initiate, making it an ideal choice for short-run production. Hard tooling costs more upfront, which is a significant investment. The low cost per part of hard tooling, on the other hand, makes it more cost-effective in the long run for large production runs.
Production Efficiency
The answer to how fast depends on when you need it. Because soft tooling has a short lead time, it is better for making a small number of parts quickly.
For making many things, hard tooling is much better. It is the clear winner for large-scale manufacturing because it can operate at high production speeds and utilize molds with multiple cavities to produce parts efficiently.
Conclusion
It’s not about which is better overall when you choose between soft tooling and hard tooling; it’s about which one is best for your project. It’s a classic trade-off: on the one hand, you want speed and a low initial cost, and on the other hand, you want longevity and high-volume accuracy.
Any product developer or engineer needs to be familiar with the differences between soft tooling and hard tooling.
When creating a new product, testing a design, or simply needing a few parts, soft tooling is your best friend. When your design is finished and you’re ready to make multiple copies, however, hard tooling is the only way to achieve the size, consistency, and low cost per part you need.
You can choose the right tooling services for your next project with confidence if you think about your budget, production volume, and timeline.
FAQs
Q：What is the difference between hard tooling and soft tooling?
A: The major difference is the material used to make the mold. Soft tooling utilizes softer materials, such as silicone, for low-volume production and prototypes. Hard tooling uses durable metals like steel for high-volume production, offering a much longer tool life but at a higher upfront cost.
Q：What is an example of a soft tool?
A: A notable example is the use of silicone molds for urethane casting. A master pattern is used to create the mold, which can then be used to produce a small number of plastic parts. These silicone tools are ideal for creating prototypes before committing to expensive, hard-to-use tools.
Q：Can softer tools cut faster than harder tools?
A: This question can be a bit confusing. In the context of machine tooling, “soft” and “hard” refer to the type of mold material, not the cutting tools. However, the process of creating soft tooling molds is significantly faster than creating hard tooling molds, resulting in a shorter lead time.