A cigarette lighter is a practical and widely used tool, allowing you to plug in and charge an electrical appliance in all sorts of places, especially on building sites. But what do you do when it is no longer functional? When a part is missing? This is a question that Kiloutou asked itself, because a plastic part (red) of the cigarette lighters on their equipment was regularly lost.
Indeed, this red part is not safe, but it is indispensable. We have therefore designed and produced replacement parts, to ensure that these parts are present and can be used normally!
We produced the drawings and proposed a prototype of a part with identical functionality, allowing identical use.
After validation by Kiloutou, we launched production with our POD service and supplied a first batch of parts very quickly.
The choice of 3D printing was the best one here. First of all, choosing the plastic injection solution would have been much more time-consuming: the conception and design of a mould, which is time-consuming due to its complexity, would have taken at least 5 weeks. The creation of the mould would also have been more expensive. Turning to this solution would therefore have been longer, but also more expensive, and the need for these parts was not sufficiently large (less than 1000 pieces per month) to make it profitable.
3D printing and our POD service was the perfect compromise between cost and speed. We were able to provide Kiloutou with plastic parts very quickly and at a lower production cost.
