Many thanks for your email.
You do have a nice tool making and moulding facility over there, especially if I see your range of moulding machines. Impressive.
I do understand and appreciate your questions to me, though it is a bit difficult to explain in just words how we have built and do daily manage our business.
I will try at least…
PRE-TENSION Tooling:
See attached presentation and example file. This will give you an idea of PRE-TENSION tool concept.
The PRE-TENSION frame is made from steel and will be used as standard bolster for every project. You do need a special torque equipment (about 10k EUR) for assembling and pre-tensing the frame and a complete frame of course (about 125k EUR).
Over here we do make all product forming parts, cavity-core-sliders-manual inserts, from aluminium. Steel won’t make sense of course, because then you could better build a full steel tool.
Zink alloy could be used as an alternative for aluminium probably, but I honestly cannot judge about that option because I don’t have experience. If you can cast that size of Zink alloy blocks, you would for sure become troubles with air inclusions, pits, etc. These will pop up once you are CNC-milling.
They will damage your bumper’s A-surface…
And be aware about the complexity of such a tool; the tool concept is made for cavity release of a bumper with hidden parting lines (which is something the German premium brands do use). So it is not a particular low-cost prototype solution for prototyping, but positioned as high-end pre-series solution.
If your customers just ask for basic bumpers with visual parting lines, I would just opt for a full steel prototype mould; maybe based on cast iron supporting frame as Japanese OEM’s tend to use for their series bumper tools. That will be more cost effective.
Low-volume market:
If you want to deliver low-volume automotive market, your organisation does need to have all necessary (quality) certificates and EDI-, IMDS-, etc. know-how and systems.
And you should have a track record and very good relation with your OEM customers for prototype- and pre-series business to start from.
So not easy and a long way to go.
Maybe you first start with acquisition for low volume in other (less demanding) business areas, like truck, shovels, tractor, etc.
For the rest it is difficult to tell from here what to do, because it is not just a copy-paste operation J.
If any further question or over thinking from your side, please do not hesitate to contact me.