Does anyone have any experience with Metal Injection Molding? I would like to hear some real world examples on a plastic injection molding company that adapted to this process & the challenges or problems they ran into.

Hi Edward,
it’s depend on you are refer on the product quality issue or during process issue,
On the process, it’s unable just directly swift the process from injection plastic to injection metal, there still have few major step need to set up the factory facility
If only comment on the product design, most of the plastic part is ok to change to metal but remain on the same product design, and the metal injection still have sink mark/drag or flasher issue, depend on how you design the tool, draft injection point and ejector area.

Thanks
WAI

Hi Edward,
Depending on the type of metal molding you are talking about will dictate the issues that could develop. We look into a pellet type of metal that you can run in plastic injection molding machines and with injection molding tooling. Some issues we ran into is you have to design the tools a little differently to achieve greater flow, it wears the tool a little more but most of all is that the raw material is inconsistent in size so it is difficult to have a repeatable process you are always adjusting it as you are running. Also we found that the pricing was still not as competitive as die casting so it is still more of a limited market. Really cool concept but for us it needed to refined more.

Dave