Tooling cost appears as Hard Tooling Cost in the cost taxonomy under Capital Costs.

The following sections describe tooling cost for the various processes and subprocesses:

The following formulas help determine tooling costs for the processes Horizontal Automatic, Vertical Automatic, Manual Std Moldmaking, and Manual Floor Moldmaking:

Tool cost depends on the following:

New tool cost is the product of the following:

Refurbish tool cost depends on the following:

This section covers tooling costs for the following coremaking processes:

Tooling cost for a coremaking process is the sum of the costs of the required coreboxes, together with the cost of periodically refurbishing the coreboxes over the course of the current scenario’s production period.

To help determine the number of coreboxes that are required, aPriori considers the GCDs that are handled by the process, and forms groups of GCDs of the same shape and size (within a small volumetric error range). At any given time during the production period, GCDs in the same group are assumed to use the same corebox.

The cost model assumes that, over the course of the whole production period, the corebox for each group is refurbished as necessary, until the corebox has been refurbished the maximum number of times, at which point it is replaced with a new corebox.

For a corebox made of a given type of material (specified by the machine property Corebox Material), the maximum number of times the corebox can be refurbished is listed by material type in the lookup table tblCoreboxMaterial. The table also lists the number of cycles the tool can perform before it must be refurbished.

Based on the following, aPriori calculates the number of new coreboxes required for a given group:

Based on the same information, aPriori calculates the number of times the corebox or coreboxes for a given group are refurbished.

The cost of refurbishing a corebox is determined as a percentage of the cost of a new corebox. The percentage is listed in the lookup table tblCoreboxMaterial in the column Corebox Cost Percent.

By default, the cost of a single new corebox is calculated based on the corebox material (specified by a toolshop variable) and the number of cavities per corebox (see below). A base cost per cavity is looked up by material type in the lookup table tblCoreboxMaterial; the base cost is then adjusted downward according to the number of cavities—the more cavities the lower the cost per cavity, due to the assumed learning curve.

The corebox cost is given by the following formula:

where the learning rate is listed in the lookup table tblCoreboxMaterial in the column Learning Rate.

Users can override the default at the GCD level with the setup option Corebox Cost.

If the process-level setup option Corebox Cavity Calculation Mode is Opportunistic (the default setting in starting point VPEs), the number of corebox cavities is the maximum number of cavities that will fit along the length direction of the coremaking machine. This depends on the following:

See Coremaking Machine Selection for more information.

If the process setup option Corebox Cavity Calculation Mode is Single Cavity, the number of corebox cavities is 1.