From reshoring to large-format casting, these are the trends shaping today’s mold and die industry.
We’ve heard it countless times in the past few years, but COVID-19 really did change everything. From healthcare to politics to the supply chain, virtually every aspect of modern life bears some mark of the most recent global pandemic.
Just look at these trends in the mold and die industry today.
1) Reshoring
“We’re seeing and hearing a lot more about reshoring initiatives and how North America needs to be less reliant on offshore, low-cost suppliers,” says David Hill, director of commercial operations at Hexagon MI Canada. “In the pre-COVID years, that really wasn’t the case.”
Anyone working with large tooling packages since the 1980s until very recently should be familiar with the back-and-forth of designing a new tool, sending it overseas to be built and then shipping it back for fine tuning on the home line. In many cases, the entire tool would be built and proven out by sending follow-up engineers before was it even shipped.
The reasons for this arrangement are obvious: just think of the classic project management triangle, often abbreviated by the expression, “Good, fast and cheap. Choose two.” Pre-COVID, when supply chains were more reliable, many engineers were comfortable with tooling that was good and cheap at the expense of being slow. Nowadays, as lead times have gotten longer, many manufacturers are reconsidering whether that trade-off is worthwhile.
“We can do a North American tool,” Hill explains, “and it’s going to cost you more money. But when we’re talking about five or six weeks on the water for shipping these tools over, who’s got that kind of time?”
2) Labor Shortages
The skills gap in manufacturing was an issue even before the pandemic, but as more and more experienced toolmakers retire over time, its impact is keenly felt in the mold and die industry. Unless we can find ways to replace or pass on the skills and the knowledge that these professionals have acquired over the course of their careers, the industry is going to face more hard times over the next decade.

“I remember when I was doing my apprenticeship in the mid-90s and we’d have people move out of the precision gauging world,” Hill recalls. “We were losing OD grinders or jig grinders, and we relied so heavily on them because they knew how to dress the wheel and set the job up so it was perfect. They were chasing microns and that’s just not something that was offered in school.”
Of course, labor shortages of this kind don’t happen overnight. Three decades of offshoring toolmaking skills combined with the growing prevalence of automation led countless North American parents to discourage their children from pursing careers they thought would soon be shipped overseas or disappear entirely. Fortunately, education has begun to shift with the recognition that this kind of labor is still sorely needed at home.
“We’re working with north of 40 schools now, and that’s just the Canadian market,” Hill says. “And the discussions we have are more along the lines of how to partner with academia and the technology providers to ensure that the courses being offered are valuable. How do we ensure that graduates are bringing value to companies right away, as opposed to needing further training?”
3) Automation
The growth of industrial automation over the past few decades has reshaped the manufacturing landscape, though not necessarily in the ways we originally thought. “People think of automation and immediately think of yellow or orange robots picking stuff up and moving it through the process,” says Hill. “But when I look at it in tool and mold, it’s really more focused on the CAD/CAM side of things.”
Examples of automation in this sense include cutter path generation, automatic feature identification and machining simulations. Rather than creating routines for tapped holes, keyways and other features “by hand” from a CAD file to create the cutter paths and G-code, designers can extract that information automatically using libraries of established machining strategies. That saves time and reduces errors and therefore reduces the need for rework.
Asked whether he believes this sort of automation can supplement the skills gap in mold and die specifically, Hill was quick to point out that it takes more than these sorts of automations to be successful. “You still need to know how to cut steel and understand the machining practices. You can’t just rely on the software if you don’t understand what it takes. The software makes the job easier, but you still need someone to go in and create your machining strategy.”
To draw an analogy with professional writing, the rise of automation in toolmaking is a bit like going from a typewriter to a word processor: you might be more efficient and less likely to make mistakes, but you still need people who know how to write.
Given the analogy, one might naturally wonder if there’s a toolmaking equivalent to ChatGPT.
“AI is going to play a tremendous role in manufacturing,” predicts Hill. “I could see a point in the future where I import a design and an AI spits out a machining strategy for it, but we’re not there yet.”
4) 3D Printing
As a technology, 3D printing has been around long enough that its primary advantage over conventional production processes constitutes a familiar refrain: create parts and components that would be impossible with traditional machining and tooling. In the context of making molds, for example, conformal cooling was seen as the killer 3D printing application.
Today, it’s hard to find a shop that doesn’t have at least one 3D printer for prototyping or tooling validation, but those are the rudimental applications. To see where the technology is heading in terms of true additive manufacturing, look no further than Divergent.
“Here’s a company that looked across the 3D printing market and said, ‘There isn’t a printer out there that is going to do what we need to do today,’ so they designed their own,” says Hill. “But their goal wasn’t to make something that was just bigger or faster or cheaper—they wanted to make a more flexible manufacturing cell. So now they can take a design and have something like a working, flying drone within four months, and the next day be able to produce components for a car.”
What makes Divergent an interesting case to consider in this context is the company’s approach to overcoming what’s typically seen as additive manufacturing’s greatest weakness: production speed. “That’s the Achilles heel at this moment,” says Hill. “So, how do I hit those higher volumes? I think we should see it as an opportunity: a problem that will be solved as the technology advances.”
This brings us to our fifth trend, one that’s unique to the mold and die industry.
5) Larger Formats
Like many of the recent trends in the automotive industry, this one started at Tesla. In 2020, the company purchased two of the world’s largest high-pressure aluminium die casting machines from IDRA Group. The OL6100 CS—also known as the Giga Press—is approximately 64 feet (19.5 m) long and 17 feet (5.3 m) tall, with a maximum shot weight of 231 lbs (104.6 kg). The idea is to diecast the entire rear subframe and suspension carrier assembly for the Model Y crossover, consolidating six parts into one.

Hill suggests that this large-format approach, combined with additive manufacturing, could revolutionize automotive manufacturing. “If I’m using a Giga Press to produce one-piece support structures for the carriage of the vehicle,” he says, “and I’m using additive manufacturing on top of that, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that combining these technologies would produce vehicles in a totally different manner because we’re already starting to see that today.”
If we consider the shifts in design and manufacturing resulting from the growth of the electric vehicle (EV) market, this large format approach could be even more impactful. Hill points to batter trays, frame components and other parts of the EV skateboard that are being produced as castings, rather than the traditional stamping approach for their counterparts in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.
The Future of Mold and Die
COVID may have been the catalyst that set some these trends in motion and accelerated others, but even without the influence of a global pandemic, it’s clear that the mold and die industry is on the verge of a major shift, and likely more than one.
The trends discussed above aren’t operating in isolation: reshoring drives demand for skilled labor, tempered by automation but exacerbated by the growth of new technologies such as 3D printing and large-format casting drive demand. Whatever the future holds, it’s an exciting time for tooling.