In modern industrial society, plastic products are very common. A lot of new products are made of plastic parts, and plastic parts of any shape are made of molds. Plastic mold manufacturing can generally be divided into 5 major steps.

1) Analysis of plastic parts

In mold design, plastic mold engineers should fully analyze and study whether the plastic parts meet the mold de-molding requirements, including discussing the geometric shape, dimensional accuracy and appearance requirements of the products. Try the best to avoid unnecessary complexity in plastic mold design and manufacturing.

 2) Plastic mould structure design

 A good mold not only needs good processing equipment and skilled mold manufacturing workers, but also requires good plastic mold structure design, especially for complex structural molds. The quality of mold design accounts for more than 80% of the mold quality. A good mold designer needs to reduce machining costs and reduce the difficulty of manufacturing and shorten the time of plastic mold manufacturing based on the premise of meeting customer requirements. A good qualified mould should be easy for manufacturing and future maintenance.

3) Determine the steel material and standard of mold components

For exporting plastic injection moulds, there are different standard for different customers. According to Suntime’s years’ experience of working with global market, there are DFM standard, Hasco standard, LKM standard and so on. In the selection of plastic mold components, we need to study customers’ standard and specification firstly, and in order to shorten the mould manufacturing lead time, choosing standard components to machine will be better. For mold steel selection, in addition to considering the accuracy and quality of the product, an appropriate choice should also be made in combination with the mold factory’s processing equipment and actual heat treatment capabilities.

4) Mould components machining and mould assembly

The accuracy and quality of a plastic injection mould is not only determined by reasonable mould design & mould structure and correct precision dimension, but also be affected by machined mould components and mould assembly & mould fitting.

Therefore, the choice of mold manufacturing processing is very important, it has big impact on accuracy of components & inserts, the method of processing has very important position in plastic mold making.

5) Mould Trials

Mold trial is an important step to check whether the plastic mold is qualified or not. During the process, you can try and choose the best molding parameter for future smooth production for plastic products. Mould trials can verify whether the de-moulding is successful or not, how the cooling effect is, and how about the gate size, position and shape affect on the products’ accuracy and appearance. Normally, first trial (T1) can’t be perfect, so after mould trial, we need to make report and make solution for corrections & modification and do T2, T3.. until parts are good enough. In Suntime Mould, we usually control the mould trials within 3 times.