When people think of plastic injection molding, it is common that they think of mass production and millions of parts produced per year off of extremely complicated, expensive steel production tools. Although this might be a common perception of injection molding, it’s not all the art has to offer. Time to break some common thought:
As some of you know, Wepco plastics was opened in the early 1980’s as a prototype injection mold builder. You see, in the 80’s, 3D printers did not exist, so if you wanted a prototype you had to build a prototype mold, even if you only needed 10 pieces to test out. Seems wasteful, and it was… but through continuous improvement, a better way was found.
On the contrary, aluminum is a great material to build prototype tooling from because it is easy to machine, light, and has an ability to dissipate heat very quickly to keep cooling times low. Also, as stated in a previous blog, if you have to make a modification it can be done very inexpensively.
Wepco has been building prototype aluminum tooling since the 80s, and we found during that time that it would be easier to sample the molds if we had a molding machine, so we purchased our first Arburg all-arounder. We started sampling tools which made it much easier to get the parts to the customer very quickly, which is now defined for us as 3 weeks or less, without worrying about using an outside source. Before long, our customers started to order production runs on the “prototype” tools that we were building. We quickly realized that our “prototype” tools that were supposed to just run a handful of parts then get discarded for a steel tool, were lasting way beyond what the expectation was. We had found our niche!
We started marketing our services to companies that didn’t need millions of parts, but rather, thousands of parts due to exploring new products or a new market! We found that the quality of the tooling that we were making out of aluminum coupled with the way we processed the molds to account for soft tooling, was allowing us to guarantee our molds for not a few thousand parts but for more around 100 thousand parts over the life of the tool. I am not only talking about molding ABS and guaranteeing 100 thousand parts, but also molding glass filled materials and guaranteeing the same. We have tools that we still use from the 80’s that have run 1 million parts.
You want to be looking for a mold builder that understands aluminum molds and how to properly maintain them for optimum life. If you need millions of parts a year, the aluminum option is probably not the right choice for you. But, if you have a product that only requires 10 thousand parts per year, or 3,000 parts per year, or 20 parts per year, and need them to have the quality and strength of a quality injection molded part, then short run production in an aluminum mold is a great choice for you. The viability of the aluminum mold speaks for itself, as Wepco Plastics has been running them for over 30 years, so if you need 20 parts or 250 thousand parts, aluminum tooling has you covered. Being cost efficient and receiving excellent value… the full package!