What You Need to Know When Buying an Injection Mould
ICOMold offers full production injection moulds 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 mould for plastic will be designed and built according to the USA/Western standard. It will be optimized for production on your injection moulding machine with details such as cooling line connections already prepared for your existing setup. Typical steel types for these moulds 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 mould injection system specifications, including the steel, hot runner system, processes, surface polish or texture of the injection mould plastic. We can also take your functional requirements for the moulds and injection moulding and match the production specifications and mould designs. Pilot and short production runs are available upon mould completion, such as for bridging a production tooling gap.
Quality Matters, and Not All Mould Makers Are the Same
Injection moulds are a large investment, so it’s important to choose a mould maker that produces high-quality moulds. You want to make sure that your injection mould 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 mould comes together) during the moulding 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 mould. While aluminum moulds are perfectly acceptable for certain types of moulding projects, we use only steel moulds because of the advantages of steel over aluminum listed here.
Mould Durability
The amount of stress that an injection mould goes through during the injection moulding process is intense. Moulds can begin to wear over time and repeated cycles. There are many factors that can increase the life of your injection mould, such as using a higher-grade, more durable steel. Also, injection moulds are designed for specific pressures and temperatures. Operating the injection mould 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 mould if needed, at our cost.
Make Sure Your Injection Moulds are Properly Designed
In consideration of more complex injection moulds, it is important that not only are they built to specification, but also that they are designed properly. With so many injection moulders 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 mould will work properly. For example, family moulds (moulds that create multiple parts in one shot) needs to be properly balanced. If a family mould isn’t made properly, you can get some parts in the mould 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 moulds.
Injection Moulding 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 mould 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 mould, at our expense, if needed.
Process for Export Injection Mould
ICOMold’s instant online plastic injection moulding quotation system and mould frame sharing technology enable us to simplify and shorten both the quoting and tooling manufacturing process for plastic injection moulding.
- Load your 3D CAD file to get the injection mould tooling quote
- Upon order confirmation, ICOMold starts the export mould order process
- You will receive the 3D full mould design for review and approval
- Upon design approval, ICOMold begins building the injection mould
- Sample approval and pilot production
- Tooling delivery
Export Injection Mould
> Built to your specifications
> Low cost, quick build and high quality
> Mould 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.
