The process involved many steps until a final prototype or product is fabricated. The first step in prototyping of plastic injection molded parts is design of part. In initial phase you have to determine the feasibility of product and its production and nothing to do with size of product.
After working on product design now move to engineering phase of productions. The parts have to be engineered so they can be easily produced in steel or metal dies. The parts are drafted and designed so they can easily cool and ejected from molds. In this process engineers have to set the wall thickness and proper design so that plastic or acrylic prototypes don’t get trapped while ejection. There should be proper place for gate, injection of molten material and to analyze the proper flow of molten material after injection. In short, an engineer has to design a proper channel to make successful prototype.
Now the next phase is designing the geometry of molds that give a shape to the part. The mold includes the pins that help in ejection of part after its formation and the flow of water lines in the mold that helps in cooling pf molten material in mold. The tool build is a way of creating molds. The design of mold is first drawn on computer which is called computer aided drawing.
Aluminum Mold
The inject molds often use steel but for production of injection mold prototype, Aluminum is used because it is best heat dissipater and it gets cool and heated very quickly. Another advantage of aluminum molds that it improves better flow of molten material in it and ultimately reduce risk of defective parts.
Steel Mold
Steel molds are used when there is high production of molded parts. Steel molds are not compatible with prototype injection molding.
For the manufacturing of more complex and complicated molds, an expensive process is used which is EDM. There are two types of molds, single cavity mold and double cavity mold and they used according to per need.
In last the everything is ready for injection of molten material but it works well less often for first time. Everything needs to be checked and adjusted properly so that it work perfect in first run.
