What You Need to Know When Buying an Injection Mold
ICOMold offers full production injection molds that will be exported from our wholly-owned manufacturing plant in China, for you to run in your own facilities or at a manufacturing facility that you designate. A mold for plastic will be designed and built according to the USA/Western standard. It will be optimized for production on your injection molding machine with details such as cooling line connections already prepared for your existing setup. Typical steel types for these molds are 718/718H, S136/S136H, NK80 or a customer-required steel type.
Different customers have different tooling requirements, so we can build to your plastic mold injection system specifications, including the steel, hot runner system, processes, surface polish or texture of the injection mold plastic. We can also take your functional requirements for the molds and injection molding and match the production specifications and mold designs. Pilot and short production runs are available upon mold completion, such as for bridging a production tooling gap.
Quality Matters, and Not All Mold Makers Are the Same
Injection molds are a large investment, so it’s important to choose a mold maker that produces high-quality molds. You want to make sure that your injection mold is made to specifications, as being even a little bit off can cause problems like flash (material that seeps out where the two halves of the mold comes together) during the molding process. This will cause your finished parts to be lower quality and might require extra time to clean up the parts. You also have to consider the quality of materials when purchasing a mold. While aluminum molds are perfectly acceptable for certain types of molding projects, we use only steel molds because of the advantages of steel over aluminum listed here.
Mold Durability
The amount of stress that an injection mold goes through during the injection molding process is intense. Molds can begin to wear over time and repeated cycles. There are many factors that can increase the life of your injection mold, such as using a higher-grade, more durable steel. Also, injection molds are designed for specific pressures and temperatures. Operating the injection mold out of these ranges can shorten its life. As long as you continue to have us mold your parts for you, we will repair, refurbish or even replace the mold if needed, at our cost.
Make Sure Your Injection Molds are Properly Designed
In consideration of more complex injection molds, it is important that not only are they built to specification, but also that they are designed properly. With so many injection molders in the world, there are varying degrees of design competence. It takes a company with years of experience and knowledge to make sure the injection mold will work properly. For example, family molds (molds that create multiple parts in one shot) needs to be properly balanced. If a family mold isn’t made properly, you can get some parts in the mold that are short shot (not completed) or have flash. Flash can be especially detrimental as it may require extra manufacturing time to trim the part.
Beware of Buying Directly from Overseas
It might be tempting to try to cut costs by buying directly from overseas, but there are several problems that can arise. Two issues are language and the time difference. It can be difficult to communicate because of the language barrier, and having different working hours can cause delays in your project. Here at ICOMold, we employ the best of both worlds business model. You work directly with a U.S.-based company, plus save money because of the lower cost structure of manufacturing in our wholly-owned China plant. Your will work with an English-speaking project manager located in Holland, Ohio, so we are easy to talk to and we keep normal business hours.
Another issue you might run into going directly to an overseas injection moldmaker is poor quality. But since we own our own manufacturing plant in China, our in-house Quality Assurance team ensures that you will receive the highest quality injection molds.
Injection Molding Part Production
While we do produce injection molds to be shipped directly to the customer, we can also run the plastic parts ourselves in our manufacturing facility. When we injection mold the parts for you, you benefit from our lifetime guarantee. As long as we are running your parts for you, we will maintain, repair and even replace your mold, at our expense, if needed.
Process for Export Injection Mold
ICOMold’s instant online plastic injection molding quotation system and mold frame sharing technology enable us to simplify and shorten both the quoting and tooling manufacturing process for plastic injection molding.
- Load your 3D CAD file to get the injection mold tooling quote
- Upon order confirmation, ICOMold starts the export mold order process
- You will receive the 3D full mold design for review and approval
- Upon design approval, ICOMold begins building the injection mold
- Sample approval and pilot production
- Tooling delivery
Export Injection Mold
> Built to your specifications
> Low cost, quick build and high quality
> Mold tooling shipped to you or your production facility
Go to our plastic injection molding and CNC machining case studies to see how we helped customers with their projects.
