From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design

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Injection molding a plastic part

Injection molding a plastic part

From the course: Rapid Prototyping for Product Design

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Injection molding a plastic part

From raw plastic pellets to finished parts dropping into a bin, injection molding is one of the most common and streamlined manufacturing processes. The process goes like this. First, we're going to select a resin or a plastic material that we're going to be injecting. That normally comes in a plastic form like a pellet, which you pour into a hopper and add into the machine. Injection molding machine has a big screw that pushes that material into a heated area, which it melts that plastic. And then we have the mold itself, which closes inside the machine, and that hot plastic is injected into that mold cavity and allowed to cool. Once it's cooled, the mold opens up, and we have these ejector pins, which are little pins which then push the part out of the mold. It'll normally drop into a bin under some type of little conveyor belt. The big problem with injection molding is really the cost of building that mold that will do all that. The second issue is that it's hard to know what…

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