Fibre Laminations Ltd. provides complete product and process design
and development services to our customers. We have engineers on staff who can work with you from concept to final production to ensure that your product looks great, works well and incorporates the latest technologies and materials. We utilize the latest CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software and CNC machining technology to design your parts or verify your own designs, to design the tooling to produce them then machine the tools.
We use SolidWorks® and Fusion 360® to create designs and toolpaths.
Our Engineering team has decades of experience designing and producing high quality fiberglass/composite parts for a wide range of industries. We use the latest tools for working with your design files or creating them ourselves from your sketches or drawings. Any successful project will follow these basic steps.
The best part designs come from a great understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of fiberglass/composites. We can help, especially if we are involved early in the design process. Even though the fiberglass part may be only one piece of your overall product design we can help optimize its design and interface with the rest of your product. It is also important to keep in mind some basic part development guidelines that the lamination process requires for successful production.
It is important to tie down early in the process what the requirements for the part will be. Specifications include:
Our engineers and designers can provide guidance to you on all of these issues. At this point the materials can be selected as well as the process to be used to produce your parts.
At FibreLam we work primarily with SolidWorks™ as our primary Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. We also have a current licence for AutoCad’s Fusion 360™. We can also work with designs from virtually any other CAD system using the .IGES or .STEP formats to transfer files from one system to another. Designing with CAD allows us to quickly evaluate and see what the parts and overall products will look like and more importantly how every part fits together. The accuracy of CAD coupled with our CNC machining centre ensure that your parts will look and fit great. Once your part and assembly design is captured in CAD, that data can be used to design reinforcements, jigs, fixtures and even skids and packaging for later production stages. We can also use our in house 3D scanner to capture the shape of your product, parts or components.
Once the basic CAD design is completed it can be used for further evaluation. Clearances and fit can be checked in assemblies. Photo realistic pictures can be created for marketing evaluation. A full draft analysis can be done to ensure successful moulding of the parts. Stress analysis can be done using the CAD data. The design can be changed or tweaked until the part is optimized. Prototype tooling can be produced fairly inexpensively if sample parts are required before final commitment to production quality tooling.
Once the design is complete, specifications are agreed on and materials are selected we can proceed to tooling design. Your parts may also require third party approvals such as CSA™, UL™ or NSF™ certification. We work regularly with those organizations and can help with that process. We also produce parts with various levels of certified fire retardancy and can help with that process.
A good part can only come from a good mould. We use our CAD system to design the tooling from the original CAD part. The mould isn’t just a mirror of the part, however. Our decades of experience have taught us how the part can shrink and warp during the moulding process so we can factor that into the mould design ahead of time. The other part of tooling is what happens after the part is popped out of the mould. We can use the CAD models to design and build trim masks and jigs as well as assembly jigs so that your parts will always fit. For parts that need more precision we can create trim fixtures for our CNC router and tool paths to cut and drill your parts.
Once the part design is complete the next step is to make a plug or pattern. That is typically machined out of MDF or foam using our in house 5 axis CNC router. It can handle single parts up to 10 ft. x 5 ft. by 3 ft. high. For larger parts we can make the plug in pieces then assemble them before finishing. The plug is then finished by spraying and sanding it before finishing up with a high gloss polish.
Once the plug is finished a mould can be laid up on it using specialized no shrink resins and fiberglass. Reinforcing foam cores as well as a CNC cut plywood frame ensure the stability and strength of the mould. The thickness and strength of the mould will be determined in the initial specification phase depending on the volume of parts required.
For parts that will be made using a closed moulding process such as Light Resin Transfer Moulding, the counter mould tools will be built using the same CNC machining process ensuring maximum accuracy and uniform wall thicknesses for your parts.
Once the initial tooling is complete one or more prototype parts can be made using the Hand Layup/Sprayup process to prove the design and integration into your product and process.
When the final approvals are signed off we can work with you to schedule production that meets your delivery requirements. Additional moulds can be made for higher production rates and shipping can be arranged to balance between just in time deliveries and cost effective shipping.
At FibreLam we also have an in house Creaform Go!Scan portable 3D scanner. We can use it to create a 3 dimensional scanned surface of your part or product. We can generate a CAD file that can be used for further design or development work. The scanning can be done at our facility or yours. We can scan parts of any size since the scanner keeps building geometry as you continue to scan. The limit is determined by the resolution and maximum file size that can be handled.
3D scanning of finished moulds or even finished parts can be used to verify the accuracy of the tooling prior to production.
At Fibre Laminations Ltd, it’s our people who set us apart. Our employees are passionate about what they do, they’re the foundation of our continued success as an industry leader and innovator, and it shows in our quality products and services. If you are driven, hard-working and have what it takes to be the very best, we’d love to hear from you!
651 Burlington St. E.,
Hamilton Ontario L8L 4J5
Phone: 905-312-9152
Fax: 905-312-9572