Mold Design & Tooling
At Metro Custom Plastics, we specialize in Design for Manufacturability (DFM) to ensure your products are designed for efficient, cost-effective, and high-quality manufacturing. Our DFM services focus on optimizing every aspect of mold design, from material selection to wall thickness, to ensure smooth production and minimal defects. We carefully consider factors such as draft angles for easy part ejection, strategic placement of parting lines and ejector pins, and gate locations to ensure even filling of molds. By incorporating DFM principles, we help you reduce production time, lower costs, and improve the overall quality of your injection-molded products. We're proud to be your go-to source for plastic injection mold design and DFM in Texas, and across the nation.
- Material Selection: Choose an appropriate material which suits both the product's function and the manufacturing process.
- Draft Angles: Ensure parts have proper draft angles to allow for easy ejection from the mold without damage.
- Wall Thickness: Design consistent wall thicknesses to prevent defects like warping, shrinkage, or sink marks during the cooling process.
- Undercuts and Complex Geometries: Minimize or eliminate features which require more complex or costly mold mechanisms.
- Parting Line and Ejector Pin Placement: Strategically position the parting line and ejector pins to maintain functional quality.
- Gate Location: Ensure gates are positioned to promote even filling.
Mold Design Tooling
-
Design with the manufacturing process in mind, not just form or prototype; prototype-friendly features (complex undercuts, sharp internal corners, deep thin walls) may be hard or expensive in production molds.
-
Plan for mold features: gates, ejection pins, parting lines, cooling. Their placement will affect aesthetics, part strength, tolerances, surface finish, cost.
-
Consider material behavior: shrinkage, warpage, cooling rates. Designs should accommodate these (wall thickness uniformity, ribs, draft angles).
-
Use mold flow or simulation early especially when going to multi-cavity molds, or when there are complex geometries.
-
Iterate between toolmaker, mold designer, and product designer so you catch manufacturability issues early.
-
Scaling up a mold (more cavities, higher volume) is not just multiplying cost, the complexity grows nonlinearly (balance of flow, heat, ejector system, etc).
Metro Custom Plastics has been incorporated in the State of Texas since 1972. During the past 50 years we have honed our skills in the injection plastics industry. We are diligent in the pursuit of continual improvement of quality products that meets, or exceeds, our customer's expectations.
