Principles of design for laminated tooling

The emergence of rapid prototyping over the last 7-8 years has had a revolutionary effect in many companies undertaking new product design. Currently, the emphasis has moved from rapid prototyping to rapid tooling. Use of laminated tooling for sheet metal working has already been proved and some work has also been undertaken to build laminated tooling for moulding plastics. Laminated tooling is relatively rare at the moment and as more tools are built using this technique the benefits and limitations will become more clear.