Vacuum Form Mold for Car Front Bumper

The job they gave us wasn’t one for the non-professionals. A South America-based automotive client tasked Borke Mold Specialists with designing, casting, CNC machining, and then vacuum forming a critical component for a car, an automotive front bumper cover. All of this was to be performed and executed within the next eight weeks. Building game-changer custom frames on an innovative deadline is one of our specialties here at Borke Mold Specialists. Not only did our company rise to the occasion, we won an SPE “Part of the Year” award because of our hard work.

Using a traditional injection mold CAD model as our basis, we first created a wood pattern to better determine our aluminum casting. The wood pattern allowed us to understand how best to apply the composite mold in terms of exact dimensions. Then, programming a Milltronics BR-50 Bridge CNC machine with MasterCAM software, we were able to craft aluminum molding with a dimensional length of 41″, a width of 25″, and a height of 22″. The cast aluminum itself came out with a wall thickness of ½” with a vacuum hole-size #72.

With tightest tolerances of ±.005″ on CNC machined components and ±1/32″ on the main body (tolerances that still provided for a .006″in shrinkage allowance), we then milled and mounted brass guides, employing components including 3/8″ in outside diameter copper tubing, a 1 ½” in outside diameter bore rotating air cylinder, ½” thick brass rods, and stainless steel lines that would provide a cooling cast into the back of the mold. After forming the mold itself, we capped it off by performing a light sandblast grit finish and testing the mold at a local vacuum former. With an estimated weight part of 600 lbs., our mold was geared and ready to be manufactured to the tune of 2,500 parts per year.

Finally, we shipped it off to our client in South America. After all that, all that was left for us to do was to win our SPE award of the year.