You have a completed design, and some printed prototypes. You have taken your part as far as you can with traditional prototyping practices. Now, you want to have a molded part for more accurate functional testing. Our standard lead time for molded parts is 15 days, and depending on the size and complexity of the part it could be as short as one day.
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The rapid injection molding process begins as it does for any molded part: You upload your CAD file for a quote. Our design for manufacturing (DFM) analysis offers recommendations so you can make early adjustments to your model. Once an acceptable CAD file is ready to go, it’s time to create the tooling (the mold) that will form the parts. That’s done by machining aluminum mold blocks to form the cavity in which the part is created.
Traditional molds use steel as the base metal. While steel is tough and long-lasting, that toughness means that it is a much longer process to create the mold cavities. If you need parts fast, that might not work for you.
By switching out steel for aluminum, you have a material that is easier to mill, and that speed is crucial to getting parts faster. While aluminum molds have a shorter lifespan than those made from steel, you can easily get about 2,000 shots from each one, which can tide you over during the early days of your product, or if you need bridge production, which we'll describe in more detail later.
After the mold is created, and the parts are approved, our standard lead time for production parts is 10 days, and we often have expedited delivery available. That could get you lead times as short as one day, depending on the size and complexity of the part.
We have secondary (post-molding) operations available, including:
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There are four primary situations in which rapid injection molding can save you at a critical time.
Rapid Prototyping: Because aluminum molds can be cut in much less time, molded parts arrive without slowing down your product development process.
Short-run production: When you need low quantities of a particular part (less than 2,000), the aluminum molds can crank out the necessary parts without issue at low cost and quick turnaround time. That scenario applies equally to on-demand production, which tends to require higher quantities, over 2,000 parts.
Line-down: One of the more critical situations you may face that can affect your supply chain is a line-down or other issue facing your manufacturer. RIM can step in to keep products in the market.
Bridge production: Maybe you want to transition from prototyping to production but want to it to happen at a more gradual pace. This is a prime example of when you can employ bridge production to navigate between phases of a part's lifecycle.
It's not only about speed. With RIM, you also reduce costs, simplify iteration, and can quickly move from prototyping to production-level manufacturing. Below, we focus the advantages of rapid injection molding in four major industries but know that the points noted apply equally well to all four industries.
Injection molding plays a vital role in the medical industry—a reliable method for producing complex, high-quality parts in large quantities. A major advantage of injection molding parts is the ability to produce liquid silicone rubber (LSR) parts quickly—an important benefit during the FDA gating process. Using aluminum molds adds to that speed, giving you a faster step toward approvals and ultimately make the move to production quantities.
Injection molding is integral to the automotive industry, enabling manufacturers to produce lightweight, durable, and high-precision components at scale.
As the automotive industry continues to evolve with recent pushes towards electric and autonomous vehicles, suppliers are relying on rapid injection molding to prototype new designs and accelerate product development.
High Precision and Consistency
Injection molding ensures tight tolerances, which are critical for the precise fit of automotive components. Parts can be produced consistently with high accuracy, ensuring that every piece fits perfectly into the larger assembly, which is essential for safety and performance.
Efficient Prototyping and Design Iteration
For new automotive designs, injection molding allows manufacturers to quickly prototype and test parts before committing to full-scale production. This is particularly useful for innovative designs or custom parts, enabling efficient testing and modifications.
The aerospace industry benefits from injection molding’s ability to quickly create prototypes for testing and validation. Engineers can rapidly iterate designs, optimizing components for strength, weight, and aerodynamics before moving to full-scale production.
Electronics components, particularly housings and internal fittings, require high precision to assemble correctly with sensitive internal hardware. Injection molding’s ability to produce parts with tight tolerances ensures the reliability of fit, contributing to the longevity of devices.
Our process is simple, and every part of our digital process is build for speed. With this in mind, we have some requirements that standard molders may not have and you'll want to consider in your designs.
We use a standard set of mills and cutters to create the molds, so there may be wall section thickness and depth requirements that differ from what was designed in your model. Don't worry, though. Any advisories that we need addressed are highlighted in the quote that you receive after uploading your model.
If further clarification is needed, you can call our customer service line at 877-479- to speak directly with an applications engineer or our customer service team and they can assist you further. Often, we can update your model for you to get mold building started more quickly. That said, we do not move forward without your approval of any updates made to your design.
Ready to get started? Rest assured Protolabs features a number of mills and molding machines that are never constrained by capacity.
Rapid injection molding is essential as the “digitization” of practically every manufacturing process proceeds. Molding is the most recent industry to witness this transition. Here’s how traditional molding service providers may be affected by digitization.
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Digital manufacturing provides numerous advantages across various touch points, including reduced time to market, labor expense, asset utilization, and improved quality and inventory control. These benefits enable users to investigate new revenue streams, create and improve novel designs, and respond to market demands. The digital age can give designers more freedom to create and develop using a single simplified technique.
On the other hand, the traditional manufacturing process often comprises a multi-step sequence inside the manufacturing flow. Team members monitor and ensure protections are in place throughout the part’s lifecycle. Various form, fit, and function tests are required to identify any part defects. Because traditional manufacturing involves more manual than automated production, each team member should know these critical-path operations.
In this guide, we are going to talk about the different benefits traditional and rapid injection molding offers us while evaluating their differences.
Injection molding is efficient and produces quickly. Its rapid manufacturing rate (15-120 seconds per part) is suited for mass production. It rarely goes wrong, and concluding steps are rare. Just inject, chill, release, and continue with manufacturing. This is done with little labor. Most molding equipment uses self-gating, an automated mechanism that keeps production efficient and rapid while minimizing waste and oversight.
Injection molding is possible with many plastics, but material choice influences part strength and mold design. If you wish to change the part’s color, use injection molding. Changing the plastic’s chemical additives will change its hue without affecting its performance.
To create a consistent finish, use liquid color additives or pre-colored resins. If part quality needs to be better, add fillers or change the design to improve impact strength, tensile strength, flexibility, or water absorption. This flexibility reduces the pace and cost of process adjustments. Injection molding is the only way to co-inject several polymers.
Injection molding creates less waste. Injection molding firms can reduce waste by recycling extra plastic. They crush up garbage and add it to plastic resin. The eco-friendliest companies use state-of-the-art gear that produces less trash. With CAD/CAM, the best injection molding plants rarely recycle damaged parts.
Injection molding makes complex pieces. For example, you can add a lot of detail to the part as it’s built, and it becomes part of the final product. Better yet, injection molding is faster and more accurate than multi-stage finishing. Moreover, one should consider key design features to make robust injection-molded parts. Need for more wall thickness, incorrect rib design, or bad gate positioning generate defective goods. Good part design is required for high-quality injection-molded parts.
Injection molding creates homogeneous pieces quickly with minor manipulation. Whether producing a tiny toy or a sophisticated item, this ensures good quality. Injection-molded parts can be as robust or stronger than almost any other plastic item on the market if you utilize the correct ribs and gussets to reinforce them. If it rarely breaks or fails, your customers will think it’s good. Plastic injection molding can avoid finishing procedures like assembling and painting, which can cause errors that degrade quality metrics.
Simple injection molding technology makes it a low-cost plastic-forming procedure. The mold design and plastic formulation take the most time and effort. The production line may start as soon as the molds are manufactured and assembled. After that, production can increase. Each mold may create many parts, resulting in cheaper products.
Companies like Prototool offer economical high and low-volume injection molding. We make bespoke and prototype injection molds. Prototool can manufacture speedy tooling and prototype molds, so you can go through several generations of injection mold designs before finding the appropriate mass-production mold. We are injection molding China professionals, and China’s reduced labor costs mean you can afford to build prototypes to show customers and investors.
The quality of the mold plays a significant role in determining the finished appearance of the surface of the molded object. CNC milling is used to create the cavity in part. Following that, various finishing procedures are carried out as well. Polishing is one of the more widespread practices among them. EDM cutting is utilized to sharpen the inner corners of the cavity.
The majority of prototype methods need to take the material into account. As a result, almost no of it is wasted. This method helps produce batches with a single number. Some items need extensive testing. Take, for illustration, the concept of a medical prototype.
Their final phase in testing entails distributing the product to customers to collect feedback on how well it performs in real-world situations. It indicates that you will require thousands of samples and fifty percent of the blank material.
Injection molding provides a higher level of precision than many other prototype methods, making it a popular choice. In rapid injection molding, the sole limitation is the precision of the mold.
The process of producing the design guarantees:
The cavity is then filled with a liquid resin injected under high pressure. It will guarantee that there are no pores in the component. In addition to this, the finished product has the highest possible quality.
Most prototyping procedures are best suited for producing a few individual pieces. Compared to conventional injection molds, rapid injection molds have a different level of durability. On the other hand, rapid injection molds can survive far more runs than most prototyping procedures.
The procedures used for prototyping are less effective than those used for mass manufacturing. In mass production, the machining operations are fine-tuned to reduce the time spent on blank setup and trajectory. It is acceptable to use a lengthy processing period when only a few components are produced from a bigger batch. Compared to other prototyping methods, the processing time for rapid injection molding technologies is the quickest.
For printing with a different type of plastic, 3D printing demands that the complete printing system be changed. It is recommended that the cartridge be replaced with blank material. This modifies many settings to print the identical part using a different type of plastic. If the situation worsens, you will require an altogether different component. When it comes to molding, this device is completely useless.
Unlike plastic, mold is constructed of high-grade aluminum, which has many more desirable features. Because of this, the mold can be utilized with virtually any kind of material.
There are other methods for developing prototypes; however, rapid injection molding is the most practical method when an organization needs a sample manufactured from genuine production components. This technique is quite similar to the traditional injection molding process; however, the mold for this approach is made in a shorter length of time and is only used for making low- to mid-volume volumes.
Mold construction in the traditional manner can take several weeks, months, or even years to ensure that all of the needed details are captured and quality components are made. The prototype tooling is meant to provide a basic feel of the final product’s design and function, but it can be better than the final tooling because it may need to be more helpful in the market.
Rapid injection molding is cost-effective due to shorter timelines and lower expenses compared to alternative methods. Companies that want prototype tooling must ensure that the prototype service provider they partner with can manage the specific projects they have in mind. Molds may not have extensive reusability due to their ease of construction. However, they are typically suitable for producing samples within the required timeframe to be delivered to the client.
Another application of this approach is bridging. Bridging enables simultaneous work on short-term and long-term aspects of a project by utilizing this production approach while production molds are being developed. This process has to be finished in sufficient time to uncover any problems or flaws in the design, allowing the production molds to be adjusted at a lower cost. The entire approach is designed to be as cost-effective as feasible for the seeking client, allowing them to proceed with product development confident that they do not have to compromise on its quality.
While traditional and rapid, both types of injection molding processes are used today; rapid prototyping is a more efficient, time-saving, and automated approach used for accurate results. Hence, if you’re looking for a reliable injection molding approach for plastic production, rapid injection molding may be ideal. In contrast, traditional injection molding may save you money throughout the process and offer its fair share of benefits.
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