Manufacturing core and cavity for shoe sole with RapidForm
      Sole Mold Design & Manufacturing
As the fancy-looking design as well as the high-tech features of shoes became a key
factor for shoe manufacturers to market their product, shortening time to market so
that they can deliver a new product reflecting customer’s needs rapidly has become
a matter of greater necessity.
And one of the bottleneck of the shoe manufacturing
process is to make the shoe mold for mass-production,
because it usually requires significant time and efforts
due to the iterative process of manual grinding of
the mold surface and core and cavity fitting. With
powerful reverse engineering capabilities, Tae Kwang Inc. Co. Ltd. significantly reduced the time to market
for shoe manufacturing by minimizing the manual
editing of sole.
Fitting core and cavity
The typical working process for manufacturing a mold
for sole wascomprising creating a wooden prototype
of sole, casting the core of the mold using the wooden
prototype, machining the cavity, and fitting the core
and cavity. The reason why they used different
manufacturing processes for core and cavity was because
the core for sole has generally much more complex shape
than cavity. The fact that they were manufacturing core
and cavity separately using different processes inherently
lowered the fitness and it requiresextensive manual editing
of mold surfaces. And if they made some changes on either
side of core or cavity, then they need to edit the other side
over the corresponding areas to reflect the change
on the other sides. After every these change, they should
check the fitness between core and cavity repeatedly, and
this made the process really time-consuming and
hard to standardize.
Redefining the process

Using RapidForm's powerful reverse engineering capabilities together with 3D optical
scanner, Taekwang Ind. Co. Ltd. completely redesigned their whole working process
for manufacturing mold for sole. In the new working process, they first build the core
by casting and after all the editing on the core they create the final core. Then they
scan the core shape using the 3D optical scanner and based on the 3D scanning data,
they build NURBS surfaces in RapidForm.
The NURBS surfaces of the core is exported into their
own CAD/CAM system and is used for designing the
cavity shape. Because the cavity was manufactured
based on the real core shape rather than ideal design
data, the fitness between core and cavity has enhanced dramatically to the extent that they do not nearly need
to manually edit the surface of either core or cavity and
the total working time to manufacture the mold is greatly shortened.
The benefits

The deployment of 3D scanning technology and powerful reverse engineering
capabilities of RapidForm enables Tae Kwang Inc. Co. Ltd. to completely reorganize
the working process for manufacturing mold for sole. Manufacturing the cavity based
on final shape of the core radically enhanced the fitness between core and cavity
resulting in minimizing the need for manual editing of mold and raising their
overall productivity. And the minimized manual editing make it a lot easier for them
to standardize the mold manufacturing process and plan the development and
production of a new product.