As an injection mold making company, it is important to control the injection mold costs effectively. So, how to reduce the cost? In order to control the cost of the injection mold, we need to analyze the impact of various factors related to the costs.
Optimized Plastic Parts Design
I believe that many people will not agree with me. Plastic part design is reasonable or not, how could this be the biggest factor affecting the cost of the injection mold? But we think about it, if the plastic part design is unreasonable, for the mold business, it will be a disaster. I have been working in an injection mold manufacturing company for more than 40 years, and I have experienced much more of this situation. Sometimes in order to achieve a buckle, but plastic part engineers and mold designers do not have good communication, the cost of the injection mold will be multiplied.
Therefore, a plastic part designer must to try to understand the knowledge of the injection mold, and making the design of the plastic part as far as possible for the mold works, do not increase the cost and the difficulty of making the injection mold. A good communication is the most effective and direct measure to reduce the cost of injection mold. Some plastic part engineers believe that the cost of mold is the mold company’s business. However, if the injection molding company and the mold manufacturing company is the same, then what will happen? In fact, this is a social trend. The company is now operating better, are injection molding companies and mold manufacturing companies as one. Single company almost cannot survive. Therefore, if the plastic part design is unreasonable, it will directly increase the cost of injection mold.
Plastic Parts Design Modification
Injection mold companies often encounter such a situation: In a project, the injection mold has just been designed, but the customers have some changes. If it is a small modification, it does not affect the overall structure of the injection mold, it does not matter. Sometimes the situation is more serious, because if the plastic parts shape changes, the injection mold need to increase other parts, even the whole injection mold must be re-ordered. The cost will increase highly. So we must reduce the design modifications. Now there are many rapid prototyping technologies. Before making the injection mold, we can make a 3D module. By timely correction the product 3D module, we can minimize the increase in costs caused by the plastic parts design modification.
Injection Mold Design Improvement
Here divide into two cases, the first is rationality and machinability of the injection mold design.
General injection mold making companies, the design team certainly have the most experienced designers and young engineers. We cannot require young engineers to design high level mold. And for experienced injection mold engineers, without communications, they cannot design a perfect injection mold. One of the most important and effective methods is the collective review. Now I believe we all have a consensus. There are many simulation methods, such as mold flow analysis, dynamic analysis of mold structure, try out the product and product design 3D comparison analysis, all of these can minimize the unreasonable cost increased by the injection mold design.
The second case is the waste of design. If the customer only needs the injection mold to produce 500 samples, but we design a mold with 300,000 capacities, in this case the cost will be high and it’s a waste.
Reduce Tryout Times
Lots of injection mold making companies calculate the mold processing fees from receiving the order to delivery. If the injection mold has several tryouts but still cannot be delivered, in addition to fail the contract, there will lead to more processing fees. Of course, the cost of the testing is also very impressive, uncontrollable injection mold testing times are a large blind spot of the mold cost control.
