When we talking about this subject, you may immediately get confused why I named “rapid injection mold” and wander what exactly difference compared against the terminology “injection mold”, which was widely familiar with by most of people. There are truly very few persons heard of it, at meantime, very few companies in the world really focused on “rapid” mold and invested in its related manufacturing process.

What is rapid injection mold?

Rapid injection mold means a mold to produce plastic parts at low volume inquiry, the mold with shorter life cycle time, normally below 50,000 shorts and total order volume is between 100 to 5000 parts from data we collected.

A share used mold base, 2 plates mold design, direct injection gate, aluminum or P20 material used for core and cavity without hardening, manual sliders and bead blasted surface. In overall view, these are a standard rapid injection mold design guideline. But vary from specific product quality requirement.

Why use rapid injection mold?

The definition above already revealed the nature of rapid injection mold. From those different designs compared normal production mold, you could conclude less expensive and shorter lead time is the natural of the rapid.

Cost effective is a big driven to develop rapid injection mold. Normally saved 40% to 60% cost compared against production mold. Mold base is free of share use, core/cavity material and no heat treatment make it also much less expensive, blasting texture instead of chemical etching or EDM also bring down the cost. Manual sliders also play a role on cost side….. All these differences bring down a lot of mold cost.

Shorter lead time is another big factor to apply rapid injection mold. Rapid injection mold generally just needs 7 to 15 days to be completed. Mold base already available at warehouse, soft core/cavity material is much easier and quicker to machine and polish. Wide range size of standard core/cavity profile already well prepared for next project…..all of these efforts make it possible to cut the lead time of an injection mold.

Where and when use rapid injection mold?

At technique side, when you design a new plastic product, you may face the difficulty to use prototype by 3D printing, CNC machining or urethanes vacuum casting to evaluate the product design and also forecast any potential quality risks in mass production. Parts from these prototyping could give you a basic visual impression and basic dimension to check your design, but totally not enough, especially for complex and precision plastic parts. The reason is physical property of the material is different from production parts. If you want a real test or robust evaluation, rapid injection molded parts have a much higher correlation relationship on dimension, cosmetic, assembly , physical property and manufacturing process variation, all of factors will build up your confidence of your product design and production.

At business side, with the internet business booming around the world, customized product at low volume is becoming one of trend because most of customer more like unique designed products, not just purchase by brand and price. That is why there are huge numbers of new startup company focused on delivering special products, but demand is normally at low volume. So if you have limited financial budget, even you are not clear about for your potential sales volume, rapid injection mold is a solution for your plastic components.

What is Disadvantage?

Everything has both positive and negative side as well as rapid injection mold. Cosmetic quality is quite close to mass production mold, but not same. Many tight tolerances on a single part may not be achieved; color match is still a small challenge. All these challenge is for sure can be improved, rapid injection mold and molding process is always flexible to be changed to meet specific quality requirements.

Contact us if you want to know more about rapid injection mold.

CY Chen

Title: Director/Engineering/Quality

Email: cy.chen@maxprototype.com

Company: Max Prototype Limited

Website: www.maxprototype.com

This document is belongs to max prototype, please link back to www.maxprototype.com if you would like to share or copy. We do not allow any 3rd party to use this document for any business purpose without agreement by CY Chen.