What You Need to Know About Plastic Injection Molding Service?

If you’re new to plastic injection molding, the process can seem mystifying and a bit daunting. Today, we’re going to take a peek behind the curtain and make sense of injection molding from start to finish. In the process, we’ll help you see exactly how easy it can be to take your next project from idea to finished product. 

In the Beginning: Proper Planning

Each successful product begins not with plastic injection molding service, but with a plan. Unlike many other plastic injection molding companies, you will get assistance at every step in the injection molding process when you select the best firms. You can come to the with a simple idea, which will help you to refine and prototype. 

The Injection Molding Process

Companies have been doing plastic injection molding for more than a century. Many of the materials and processes have evolved. These days, sophisticated computer modeling increases accuracy and tolerances, and new materials like biopolymers are revolutionizing the industry. For all those changes, there’s also much in the process that’s remained remarkably consistent.

It starts with mold making, the tooling of a two-piece metal mold that will receive molten plastic. During the initial part of the molding process, both halves of the mold are kept tightly shut.

Next, raw plastic resin in pellet form is fed into a hopper. The pellets may be purchased pre-colored, or colored using pigments during the injection process. The plastic pellets are melted down under high heat and subjected to extreme hydraulic pressure in excess of 15 to 30 thousand PSI.

The resultant resin is shot into the closed mold through a sprue. From the sprue, it flows to a runner, a channel that allows the liquid plastic to flow to gates — subchannels leading to the cavities in the mold that contain the imprint of the finished product. The material is allowed to cool and return to a solid state, whereupon the mold opens and the part is ejected.

If you’ve ever purchased a plastic model kit, you have some idea of what the next step looks like: a series of plastic parts attached to remnants of the sprue, runner, and gate. Once the parts are separated, the leftover plastic can be melted down for re-use to prevent waste and reduce costs.

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