Plastic Injection Molding: Benefits and Limitations

One of the most commonly used methods of manufacturing identical plastic products in bulk is injection molding. However, like every process, it’s important to understand the specific design restrictions that must be considered to facilitate the obvious benefits of successfully producing high-quality, cost-effective parts.

Here, we talk about the benefits and limitations of plastic injection molding:

Benefits

Low cost per part

Although the initial high investment for the plastic injection molding tool is high, the cost per part is pretty low. While other plastic processing techniques may need a number of operations, such as polishing, injection molding can do everything at once. If you decide to do CNC machine apart, it may be costly. Injection molding will be your best bet if you’re looking to go into full production.

High repeatability

Once you’re done making mold tools, it’s possible to produce similar products repeatedly. The mold life of a decently made mold is quite lengthy – as long as the molding machine setters treat it well.

Precision

Plastic injection molding is ideal for complex parts. Compared to other processes, molding enables you to incorporate additional features at very small tolerances.

Limitations

Large part size limitations

Plastic injection moldings are produced by huge machines. Bigger parts require an enormous mold tool and become costly to make. In such cases, plastic fabrication might be a better choice.

Initial lead time

From product conception to the production of the part, it can take months of tool manufacturing, testing, and design. With that being said, you can have the finished moldings within 6 weeks if you know what you want.

Once you have the tool, it doesn’t take a lot of time to run the moldings, especially when you have a multi-impression mold tool.

High initial cost

Sometimes, numerous rounds of modeling and designing are required before the go-ahead is given. Then, the injection molding tool required to make the moldings would need manufacturing and designing. The mold tool is a complex piece of work that costs many machining hours, material, and manpower to make and represents the biggest cost in getting injection moldings. When everything is done, repeatability is extremely high, and the part cost is very low for hundreds of thousands of moldings.

PTMS provides injection molding services to customers worldwide

PTMS is an ISO 9001-2008 certified plastic injection molding company with more than 20 years of experience in all kinds of injection molding mass production.

Reach out to them directly for more information on their plastic injection molding parts!