Vacuum forming is traditionally a slower manufacturing process. Typically a mold needs to be machined, which requires programming & setup time, and then the thermoplastic gets formed. With 3D printing, one can print a mold overnight and form the parts the next day.

Vacuum forming can be done both with FDM and SLA. The latter yields much higher quality in terms of surface finish but is more costly to produce, especially when molds are larger in size. In this blog post we highlight two examples, one with an FDM printed mold, and one with an SLA printed mold.

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