Years ago, in the days of drafting boards and electric erasers, there was a mold design department where a veteran lead designer welcomed a young new member to the design staff. An engineering grad with sufficient years of mold design experience, the new designer was surprised when on his first mold assignment, […]
Rotating cores are the most common solution to this problem. This is one of the most common setups. The rotating core features a gear, bearing journals and a retracting thread, in addition to the molding thread. The basic operation is to rotate the core and retract it at the same time and at the same [...]
The collapsible core offers some unique advantages to the traditional rotating core. The concept of the collapsible core is to first collapse the core to a small enough size to be able to clear all the molded features of the piece part, and then retract the core from the molded part. It sounds and looks [...]
The applications of a flash-free collapsible core are nothing short of incredible. Undercuts, O ring grooves, tabs, ribs, bosses, locking tabs, and threads are easily produced. Straight or even back-tapered bores are no problem. […]
Reverse engineering or digitizing a physical part is a critical task for any mold and pattern shop. Most customers say that they design all of their parts on a CAD system; […]
RP is basically a visual aid that allows the moldmaker to evaluate the design and know it is correct before the process moves to the hard tooling stage. […]
Global competition is having an ever-increasing impact on almost every industry in existence today – increasing the need to supply consumers with new products rapidly. It is a well-known fact that the first manufacturer to introduce a new product in demand will see the greatest payback. In addition, consumers are demanding additional product customization. This [...]
Whatever the item a company intends to produce, creating a prototype is crucial to the design process. Moldmakers would be wise to stay on top of technology developments and consider their use to improve the service they provide. Following are four reasons why prototyping is important. […]
A moldmaker typically creates simple subplates with dozens, even hundreds, of holes that must be drilled, bored and tapped. Using conventional CAM to program all of these features for manufacturing on a CNC mill could take several hours. Today, he can import a model of the subplate from his CAD program, bring it into the [...]
Stereolithography is a 3-D layering manufacturing process that applies ultraviolet lasers to cure liquid photopolymer resins to produce solid, plastic, 3-D objects that simulate properties of polyethylene, polypropylene and polycarbonate materials. […]