Per: Green sand’s tooling costs can be around €40,000 for a tool steel (750x535mm) pattern. Such a tool will have a minimum lifetime of 300,000 cycles. This makes tooling costs less than €0.14 per cycle. For prototyping, where you only need a short tooling lifetime, low-cost tools can be made in material like plastic blocks, aluminium or woods. In this case, tooling cost will be around €5-10,000. This makes prototyping fast, cheap, and easy, with a very short time from CAD to prototype.
Producing aluminium castings in green sand offers short cycle times, typically from 100 to 300 cycles per hour. Given that it takes three minutes or less to change a pattern on a DISA line, short runs are also efficiently produced.