The ProtoMold Company, Inc. is a Minnesota-based injection mold shop with a unique capability to respond to customer needs in five days. From their website at www.protomold.com:

"We build aluminum injection mold tooling in 5 days from your 3D CAD part file. We do it with proprietary ProtoMold-exclusive software and a hyper-automated rapid tooling process based on high speed CNC machining. Here are some examples of jobs we have done recently:"

ProtoMold has been a customer of SMLib since September of 1998, one month before we announced the general availability of the product. Larry Lukis, the president and founder of ProtoMold, was an early advocate for the power of SMLib. He especially appreciated the availability of source code as he stated:

• "SMLib looks to be very interesting. I'm especially attracted by the fact that it is distributed in source code form. I hate opaque black boxes! Also the licensing terms seem to fit our needs."



• "Gotta love source code, and the VC++ debugger! This problem only slowed me down for 5 minutes, whereas if this was an object library it would have been a week in the very best circumstances."

At one point of development, Larry illustrated the power of the library with the following scenario:

"Today I decided the answer to a problem I was having was in fact filleting. So I thought I'd give it a try tonight.

• 8:15p: Found the docs and scanned through. Ah, Topology filleting is the one I           want.



• 8:45p: Finished writing my own little PmBody::FilletEdges routine following the           guidelines in the docs.



• 9:15p: Wrote a little user interface to pick edges and fillet them.



• 9:30p: Building. Oops, I guess I never updated my NmtLib project to include the           filleting code.



• 9:45p: Got it built.



• 10:00p: Testing. Fillet failed... I'll do a little tracing through and get some insight             into what might have gone wrong.



• 10:05p: Duh, forgot to enable editing on the brep... seems like I remember reading             that somewhere.



• 10:10p: Fillet succeeded, but program crashed as soon as the display refreshed.



• 10:15p: Ah, display object was not being updated after the fillet, and crash             happened when mouse moved over face which didn't exist anymore.



• 10:20p: Cool, it worked!"

• "I can unequivically state that the support is nothing less than phenomenal...In my opinion, the quality of the code is excellent - world class."

Larry has been especially helpful in making many suggestions for improvements to SMLib. ProtoMold's use of the product has significantly enhanced the types of molds they can produce, and they can produce them faster! Larry was able to develop his applications significantly faster due to the power of SMLib, the debug tools, and the technical support just a call or email away.

• "We got our product to market much faster by using SMLib!"

ProtoMold has been so successful meeting their customer's expectations, that they have been challenged to maintain their five-day commitment.

• "When we started promoting our service late last summer, the response overwhelmed us to the extent that 5 day delivery often wasn't possible! We have been working hard to build our infrastructure and increase capacity."

They have met those challenges, expanded staff and manufacturing capability, and continue to meet their mission:

• "To radically reduce the time it takes to get prototype injection molded plastic parts."
• "To make plastic injection molding a practical option for products not requiring large quantities of parts."

The ProtoMold Company is typical of the companies taking advantage of the power of the NURBS-based geometry kernel in SMLib with the leverage of source code in combination with our responsive technical support. Explore their website for more details, and explore the SMLib website to fully appreciate the depth of SMLib and the potential to help you in your business. Contact us at info@smlib.com for more information.

      Exhibition July 25 - 27 in booth 539

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