Questions To Ask When Sourcing Injection Molded Parts

Deciding to source injection molded components for your business application is a vital step for saving your company both money and time. Not only do these services help you avoid the hassle of creating these items on your own, but they also ensure 100-percent accuracy in your initial product component design. However, you must ask the right questions before signing on with a certain company to make the most of this process. Here are some key questions to ask when sourcing injection molded parts.

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What Are the Capabilities of Your Machines?

Before you sign on with an injection molding business, you must first understand its facilities. With thousands of different machines circulating in this industry, they can offer different part outputs for your money. As such, understanding what you’re paying for and how quickly these machines can process your order is the key to applying them faster. Asking about this also ensures that your chosen injection molder can handle the size of your order and produce the number of items you’re asking for without sacrificing quality.

Do the Products Have a Lifespan Guarantee?

Speaking of quality, you also want to ask about the standard expected lifespan of an injection molding company’s products. After all, the last thing you’d want is to pay for parts that don’t fulfill their application. Experienced professionals in this industry should have the resources and know-how to produce a component with a sufficient lifespan. So, if they can’t provide you with a service guarantee, that could be a sign you should look elsewhere.

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Can You Fit Within Your Budget?

You need to ask about costs and budgeting options ahead of time as well. Even if you greatly need a certain set of components, it simply isn’t a viable option for your business if the production costs are too high. Therefore, you’ll want to know what you’ll pay before signing any binding contract for your project.

Does Your Company Have an Experienced Design Team?

One of the most important questions to ask when sourcing injection molded parts is whether a company has a qualified team behind it. Even if an injection molding business has the best equipment, it’s meaningless if its team doesn’t know how to get the most out of them. Thus, you’ll want a business that openly discusses its experience and how it’s grown over its years of operation.

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There isn't an injection molding subforum, so hopefully this will work.

My wife wants to develop a household item that would be best suited to manufacture via injection molding, so I'm working on the preliminary stuff.

I've contacted a few shops and have received one quote so far. The quote received was from a more "PROTO"type shop it seems with a significant web interface. I'm not going to name names though. The quote I received seemed to be significantly higher than expected, especially for the mold making. Am I missing something as far as the quality the mold needs to be? There are three different parts and I was quoted $5k for a mold for a part that is less than 4"x3"x.5". I can't really say what the parts is, but we'll say it is shaped like a hook from a clothes hanger. I haven't received a quote back yet from what I feel would be a more down to earth IM shop, so I have no comparison.

Does anyone here do a lot of mold making and can tell me if this is a reasonable price?

Are there any representatives for IM shops here on PM that I can talk to about quotes?

Thanks.

Jay

$5k isn't much but it really depends on what you are getting, and what you want. Aluminum molds are my favorite, both to make and run. Are all three parts moldable? If so can they all be put in the same mold, ie be made from the same plastic?

My original intention was to have all 3 pieces in the same mold to where they would break apart by the end user for final assembly. The outfit said they can't do it that way, which strikes me as odd, but it has more to do with the way they quote electronically.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk the price of 5k is normal,maybe even a tad cheap,yes even for one part. as long as the parts are somewhat similar in size and height,and of course, same plastic, they can all go in one mold. but be careful what you get. some hack shops make garbage molds that flash (leaks at Parting Line), have poor cooling lines, and crappy steel that wont survive long in the Mold Press. the range between a cheesy mold and high quality mold is far apart. (used to make plastic inj. molds for 20 years) Jay,

Welcome to the world of product development. (insert half a smiley) Yes, it can cost 10,000's of dollars to get even a simple-cheap-and-cheerful product ready for production. Ask me about my $400 prototype sheet metal brackets (estimated production cost in modest volume: well under $2). Tooling is expensive, and you pay for it all right up front before you ever know you'll make any sales.

$5,000 does not sound terribly high for a mold, although another shop probably can quote it lower based on your rough description of the part complexity. Doesn't do you any good in this instance, but that same $5,000 would probably buy you a more complex part at the same vendor. If you are hinting at the same PROTO vendor everyone here is familiar with, you get some intangibles, namely that the mold will definitely work with the injection machines. Being in the middle between independent mold makers and molders can be an aggravating situation. For what it's worth, between 3 molds; the one given already, one for a part that is 1"x2"x1/2" and one that is 16"x8"x1/2", the total mold price was about $23,000. The per part price seemed high at about $6 for the three parts at units. This is probably not going to happen. It's a unique enough product that it might be able to sell for $7-8 but after shipping and packaging, I'm already upside down. And I refuse to go overseas for something like this.

Edit: the per part price was after the mold cost. So the first would cost $23-30 each. Volume is EVERYTHING. At 10,000 parts it might be just $2 a set, at 100,000 it could be $0.75 a set. At a million you'd probably be shocked at how low it would go.

Another thing to remember. It is VERY easy to design an expensive to mold part, and often quite difficult to design one cheap to mold. I would approach other vendors and see if any of them can recommend changes to get the price where you need it. Those "get your prototype done FAST' outfits sell speed, not price. Lots of considerations developing a molded part; mold design dictates both cycle time and post molding handling,packing, etc. Plus, while I realize you only want to test the waters, but parts is only one shift, if that. That is going to incur a set-up charge, for sure. We don't do custom molding, but if someone places a rush order that makes us pull a mold to hang another, we add four hours just for set-up, then setting up the job we pulled again. Sounds like because of different part sizes you have three molds, which may be happiest in three different size presses, so THREE set-ups.

The old traditional way to approach this is to talk to a custom molder, not the toolmaker. The molder will offer guidance as to what material the mold should be (aluminium, P-20 pre hard, or fully hardened tool steel) gating (sprue direct to part, cheap, but expensive to have someone de-gate each part, conventional runner and tab gates, or a hot tip) and mold bases (many molders use at least some Master Unit Die sets, which save part of the cost of the mold base) but not all molders use the same size. Once you get a molder to agree to run the job, they will contract with a toolshop that can do the tooling, and get it right.

Which brings up the point... unless you have some familiarity with injection molding, don't even think of building your own. There are all sorts of nuances that only become evident upon test shooting, and you get charged by the hour plus set-ups for the press time for test shots.

Dennis As others have said, the prices you have are not out of the realm of possibility. It's hard to tell without seeing the parts whether they could be all run in the same tool if they are being made out of the same type of plastic. We do prototyping and mold building as well and our first step in the developement process is to 3D print the said new product. We have a SLA printer and it allows us to make accurate changes to sizes for fit. When we're happy with fit and function we will build an aluminum tool for injection molding. We have had aluminum molds last several hundred thousand cycles which is enough to determine how big a seller your product is going to be. Should a multi cavity, high production quality mold be needed to keep up with demand, you should have time to get it going before the aluminum prototype gives up the ghost. We are a captive molder (we only develope our own products,no outside work) but if I can help you with advise I will. Good luck! The developement process can be daunting. We are working on a product now that has been in the works for going on 2 years and we are still in the prototype mold phase.

That is a good deal for a high-quality mold by an American tool maker.

You can probably get it made for half that if you go to the bad place.

And if you go to the "bad place" you better have the machinery and tooling (nevermind the expertise) to rework the runner/nozzles/shut off faces/etc when the mould won't shoot properly. $5k is very cheap for an injection mould. Someone with zero experience thinks the price is high, surprise surprise. Some people just have the default mentality that every price they see is "high".

I went back and read "RC Mechanics" post, nowhere do I see any writings justifying your vicious reply.

"Someone with zero experience thinks the price is high, surprise surprise. Some people just have the default mentality that every price they see is "high"."

Vicious reply? I replied to a generalization that was intended to encompass me. If you don't think that was justifiable, move along. There were 10 other replies to my question telling me what I found is what to expect and I thanked them. You didn't notice that did you?

My understanding of how molds are made and priced was unclear, which is why I asked. We're all manufacturers here, so I looked at the mold making process of taking a negative of my part and machining that cavity into two chunks of aluminum. An hour of CAM and a couple hours of machining does not justify $5k to me. So there has to be more right? Or are mold makers doubling and tripling their cost because they can?