Ship production parts 6 weeks sooner. Bridge tooling.

Pre-production (or "bridge") tooling bridges the gap between design freeze and full steel-tool production. Build aluminum rapid tooling in 14 days, run 500–10,000 production-material parts, while steel production tooling takes its full 6–8 week build time. Customer-facing shipping starts 6 weeks earlier — major competitive advantage for product launches and seasonal demand.

Simple aluminum single-cavity injection tool: $1,500–3,500. Medium complexity with side actions: $3,500–6,000. Multi-cavity family mold: $5,000–12,000. Compare to steel production tooling at $15,000–80,000. Pre-production tooling is often 1/5 the cost of full production tooling while enabling real-material production runs.

Yes, nearly all thermoplastics: ABS, PC, PC/ABS, PP, nylon, POM, PBT, TPE, TPU. Aluminum tools have slightly faster cycle times than steel (better heat dissipation). Glass-filled materials wear aluminum tools faster — plan on 3,000–5,000 parts vs 10,000 for unfilled materials. For abrasive materials on large production volumes, steel remains the better choice.

Three scenarios: (1) Product launch timing — pre-production tool enables early customer shipments while steel tool builds. (2) Design validation — catch production design issues in real production materials before committing $50,000+ to steel tooling. (3) Uncertain market demand — pre-production tools enable "test the market first" strategy for 500–5,000 units before committing to full production volume investment.

Geometrically: yes — both are injection molded in the same material from precisely machined tools. Slight differences: aluminum tool parts may have ±0.05 mm vs steel tool parts at ±0.025 mm (aluminum thermal expansion slightly larger). Surface finish: SPI-B1 standard on aluminum vs SPI-A2 polish on steel. For most production applications, parts are indistinguishable to end users.

Yes — common practice. We build the aluminum pre-production tool first (14 days), then immediately begin steel production tool design and build (6–8 weeks) with lessons learned from the aluminum tool runs. This parallel approach compresses overall program timing by 4–6 weeks vs sequential tool builds.