A well-maintained (and designed) mold is the key to producing consistent, high-quality injection molded parts. Uniform cooling of the entire cavity (and uniform cooling from cavity to cavity in multi-cavity tools) will produce the highest quality parts and the fastest cycle times.

Ensuring mold quality requires well-designed molds and higher precision, both of which will increase mold manufacturing costs and regular maintenance costs. However, these measures will ultimately save you a lot of maintenance costs.

As a best practice, choose a mold manufacturer responsible for maintenance, such as cleaning the parting line during production operation, and have a dedicated service team to record and track mold maintenance to ensure that your mold gets the long-term it needs maintain.

How can your supplier help?

As a strategic partner with your supplier, you can help reduce many of the risks and costs associated with injection molding. They can help you:

Optimize part design and mold design

The complexity of part design promotes the development of tool design. Optimizing part design and mold design with your suppliers can improve tool life and part quality. Generally, simple feature changes can increase the robustness of the tool, simplify manufacturing, and ensure consistent part quality.

Make the most of your tool investment

Achieving the “correct size” of the tool budget means optimizing the type of tool investment and the required quantity. Excessive investment will waste money, but insufficient investment will lead to shortened mold life, supplier reliability issues and increased costs. Increased costs can include reactive tool maintenance, while the tool should produce parts, as well as overall mold maintenance and repair during the tool life cycle.

Empire designs molds to make the PM process easier for customers. According to specific part design, industry, materials and other factors, we have established a unique PM cycle for each mold. By providing multiple levels of maintenance-from basic cleaning and wear assessments to higher-level disassembly and complete inspections-by fully recording the scheduled rotations within each service interval, we can ensure that your mold is It can work normally every time it is put into use.

Choose the right development tool

There are many options for making prototype parts. SLAs, decomposition tools, and other strategies can accelerate the time to market for projects. For special applications, such as high-altitude precision parts using complex tools, a prototype mold with production intent that can replicate cooling, pouring, and ejection strategies will reduce the risks associated with production molds.

Empire has also built components so that they can be removed individually without having to disassemble the entire tool, which saves maintenance time and increases the life of the tool.