What You Should Know About the Basics of Prototyping

By David Clark, New Business Development Manager, the Malco Design & Deliver Group

As an inventor, one of the things you'll need to do is to create a prototype of your product. A prototype is a helpful necessity, because it enables you to test and refine your idea, to measure user interaction during development, to provide the proof of concept needed to attract funding, and to demonstrate that you are serious about your invention.

There's more than one way to create a prototype, ranging from a homemade "presentation" prototype carved from a block of wood to a pre-production prototype, incorporating all the working features of the go-to-market product.

Some prototypes may be created from production materials that require manufacturing processes with higher capital costs, such as plastic injection molding. In other cases, expensive and time consuming one-of-a-kind tooling may be needed to fabricate a custom design. For these reasons, individual prototype costs may be substantially greater than final production costs, and this is not always practical at the prototype stage.

One avenue for creating a prototype that you may want to consider is called rapid prototyping, which has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Rapid prototyping can quickly produce prototypes from CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings. Rapid prototypes can cost as little as a few hundred dollars each, a relative bargain when compared to alternatives such as plastic injection molding, which can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.

Rapid prototyping uses additive manufacturing technology to make objects from the three dimensional data in CAD drawings. It's a process of joining materials, such as powdered plastic and metal, layer upon layer to create these objects. Examples of additive manufacturing technology include fused deposition modeling (FDM), laser sintering (SLS), and stereolithography (SLA). This is opposed to subtractive manufacturing, which creates objects by removing material from a solid piece of metal, plastic or wood, such as turning a spindle or newel post or machining a gear or sprocket.

Creating a prototype of your idea is a vital step in the invention process. You should give careful consideration to what your needs are, then determine the best process to use.