Wednesday, May 09, 2018

 

Do you need to produce a large quantity of one specific part? You can do it easily by designing a custom mold prior to starting production. A custom mold will allow you to produce the same part over and over again until you have as many parts as you need. However, before you get started, you should follow a few tips while designing your initial custom mold. Check them out below.

Keep Wall Thickness in Mind.

The wall thickness of your mold will play an important role in the production process. If the walls of your mold have different thicknesses, they will cool at different rates, and it can actually mess with your final product. While you don’t necessarily have to keep your wall thickness uniform throughout a mold, it’s a good idea to do it. Moreover, if you decide not to, you should design your custom mold with the manufacturability of your part in mind. This will ensure that you take the different wall thicknesses into account and create a mold that allows for each part of the wall to cool accordingly.

Consider draft.

Draft is what determines how easy it will be to remove your finished part from your custom mold. You should think about adding several degrees of taper to your mold so that you can take a part out of the mold without any problem. When you’re able to take parts out of a mold easily, you won’t damage the parts or cause any unnecessary friction to take place.

Think about adding texture directly to your mold.

There are some people who choose to manufacture parts using a mold and then put those parts through another finishing process to add texture to them. In reality, you can skip the second step by adding texture right to your mold so that a part gets all the texture you want when it’s being created. This can save you time and money and give you more control over the production process.

If you need assistance creating custom molds for rubber and plastic parts, Lowrance Machine Shop can help. We have been helping companies create custom molds for more than 50 years now. Call us at 281-449-6524 today to see what we can do for you.