From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design
Join today to access over 22,500 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
Building an injection mold
From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design
Building an injection mold
The process to build an injection molding tool starts with a mold base. These are large steel or aluminum blocks that have to be machined directly, or they can have inserts added that allow the mold base to be reused. To machine the mold, a CNC mill generally use to carve out the cavity that the plastic will be injected into. Then, vents, ejection ports and holes for injector pins will be added, so the part can be pushed out of the mold. For fine details and small corners, sometimes an EDM machine will be needed to remove this material. Finally, the inside of the mold will be textured or polished. Texturing can generally be done with a bead glassing process, and polishing can start in a machine, but generally requires some hand finishing at the end. When you're building an injection mold, a couple other things to keep in mind though is the materials that's going to be used to inject the mold. Now, different materials have different mold and shrink rates, so therefore, you need to make…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.